. "2 Scope and Patterns of Work by Children and Adolescents." Protecting Youth at Work: Health, Safety, and Development of Working Children and Adolescents in the United States. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1998.
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Protecting Youth at Work: Health, Safety, and Development of Working Children and Adolescents in the United States
Table 2-2 Hours Worked per Week by Grade (in percent)
Grade 7
Grade 8
Hours Worked per Week
School Year
Summer
School Year
Summer
0
58.82
46.62
53.93
40.70
1 to 4
22.22
16.88
21.55
14.60
5 to 9
10.91
13.80
13.59
13.58
10 to 14
3.49
6.67
4.59
7.17
15 to 19
0.80
2.82
1.20
2.99
20 to 24
1.61
3.98
2.03
5.64
25 to 29
0.40
0.88
0.53
2.59
30 to 39
0.22
3.66
0.88
5.68
40 or more
0.37
2.90
0.75
5.57
Missing data
1.15
1.80
0.96
1.49
SOURCE: Special tabulation for the committee. Data collected by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, J. Richard Udry, principal investigator,
some studies, students must be working a minimum number of hours per week to be considered employed. Some studies include only paid work, and others also include unpaid work. Some studies include informal work, such as babysitting or lawn-mowing, but others do not. Because of these varying definitions, estimates of employment vary considerably across surveys (Kablaoui and Pautler, 1991). Determining the extent of labor by children and adolescents at the state or metropolitan-area level is even more problematic, making geographical comparisons within and among states difficult (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1997). The CPS publishes state-specific data only for the age group of 16-to 19-year-olds.
Results are influenced by whether the respondent is the child, the parent, or another household member. As noted above, parents systematically understate their children's labor force attachments, particularly for children who are still in school. The nature of the sample may also have an effect. Samples drawn from school populations miss teenagers who have dropped out of school. About 9 percent of all 16-and 17-year-olds are not in school (based on 1990 census data), so studies done in schools miss a group of young people
