The study from which these data come was conducted at Northwestern University’s Institute for
Policy Research under principal investigators Kathryn Edin, Greg Duncan, and James Rosenbaum. The data
on the families in the program were collected from 2002 to 2005 with 91 of the total 549 families who
attended the Gautreaux Two orientation sessions. Researchers conducted four waves of in-depth, focused
interviews with the adult respondents in their homes over a three-year period. Starting in 2004, data were
collected from 93 (out of 110 eligible) children in 57 of the families. If families had children ages 11-19
living in the home, up to three eligible children were randomly selected to be interviewed. The interviews
were semi-structured, open-ended interviews that lasted between an hour and a half to three hours. The
interviews covered the topics of family, neighborhood, school, peer networks, health, and future aspirations.
We analyzed the transcripts of the interviews with all of the youth. We constructed a profile for each of the
youths regarding the topics covered in the interviews, specifically coding the educational, career, and family
expectations that the youth discussed. From these profiles we created categories that emerged from the
coding based on the aspirations of the youth.
Results
There are 93 respondents in our sample, and 88 of these youths specifically discuss their aspirations
and expectations for the future. We focus on these youths for our analysis. We categorize the youths based
on their educational and career expectations and how well these expectations are aligned, and we find that
there are two broad categories. The first category consists of youth who offer a fairly concrete idea of what
they would like to do in the future, and their educational, career, and family expectations are aligned. There
are 34 youths in this category, so over one third (38.6%) of the youths have aligned expectations. The second
group of youths has high educational or occupational aspirations or multiple ideas of what they would like to
do in the future, but they have only vague ideas about how to achieve these goals. Fifty-four, or 61.4% of the
youths are in this category. In this analysis, we focus on each of these categories and discuss the narratives
the youth offer about their aspirations and expectations and the factors that influence them. We describe how
youths perceive their future plans and the degree to which they seem to consider educational, occupational,
and family goals in congruence or separately. Thus, we analyze the youth’s own narratives about what
mechanisms influence this process. We do not make causal claims about why some youths have aligned
6
Convention