Home background,intelligence, personality and education as predictors of unemployment in young people

This study is concerned with the degree to which youth unemployment in N. Ireland can be predicted from a number of antecedent variables. It was found that home background, IQ, personality, school type and educational attainments all had significant effects on unemployment. The magnitude of the effects and the causal mechanisms through which they operate were analysed by path analysis in terms of the Duncan-Jencks path-analysis model. The results show that the model holds well for N. Ireland; the major difference is that school type (grammar vs secondary modern) plays a greater role in N. Ireland than school differences in the U.S.A. The data are considered from the point of view of the intergenerational cycle of deprivation hypothesis. It was found that using the criteria of father-son and father-daughter correlation for unemployment, the cycle is quite weak in N. Ireland.