HOMESCHOOLED ADOLESCENTS: Drugs, Delinquency, and Grade Level

Record: Sharon Green-Hennessy, “Homeschooled Adolescents in the United States: Developmental Outcomes” in Journal of Adolescence 37, no. 4 (June 2014): 441-449 [Abstract here]

Summary:  Green-Hennessy is a psychology professor at Loyola Maryland.  After beginning with a very strong lit review, she describes the methodology of the data set she’ll be using in this study, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH).  It is a yearly, nationally representative survey of U.S. household residents age 12 and over.  Subjects are interviewed by trained professionals and paid $30 for their trouble, which results in very high response rates (between 69 and 77% during the years Green-Hennessy uses).  Green-Hennessy combined the data on children aged 12 to 17 for the years 2002-2011, which gave her 182,351 subjects overall.  The demographics of this massive sample reflects the nation at large quite well.  Since one of the questions asked on the survey was type of schooling, Green-Hennessy was able to use this data to determine to what degree homeschooling prevents or exacerbates behaviors known to put adolescents at risk for drug use.

Of the 182,351 adolescents surveyed by NSDUH between 2002 and 2011, only 1094, or .6% reported being homeschooled. 

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Homeschoolers and Health Care

This post reviews Alissa Cordner, “The Health Care Access and Utilization of Homeschooled Children in the United States” in Social Science and Medicine 75 (2012): 269-273.

Cordner, a graduate student in sociology at Brown University, here offers her first foray into homeschooling research.  She used the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), a government phone survey of over 91,000 households randomly sampled from the national population.  The NSCH asked families about the kind of schooling the child being reported on attended, including homeschooling, so Cordner’s got great data from which to draw conclusions.

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