Transition Pathways in Education, Work, and Home-Leaving among Rural Youth in China

Donghui Wang , Princeton University

Limited scholarly attention is paid in investigating youth’s transition pathways in multiple domains of life from a rural, non-western context. This study has two objectives. First, describe transition pathways in education, work, and home-leaving among a group of rural youth residing in one of China’s most impoverished provinces– Gansu Province. Second, provide a critical documentation on the roles that structural and agentic resources play in shaping rural youth’s pathways into adulthood. Data came from Wave 1 (2000) and Wave 4 (2009) of the Gansu Survey of Children and Family (GSCF). Latent class analysis (LCA) is used to characterize youth’s diverse transition pathways patterns from age 12-19. Multinomial logit model is then applied to investigate agentic and structural resources that associated with different patterns of transition pathways. LCA analysis revealed six latent pathways. Three sets of variables distinguished between these groups: youth’s agentic orientations, family SES, and community-level educational resources.

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 Presented in Session 49. Work and Education Outcomes in the Transition to Adulthood