The current study focused on 479 men and women from South Carolina who were enrolled as participants in the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) multi-site program evaluation shortly before prison release in 2004 or 2005. The original SVORI data suggested that the South Carolina respondents were similar to the multi-site sample with "committed to not going back to prison" as the most common reason for desisting and using drugs or alcohol as the most common reason for persisting. The goals of the current study were to (1) update information on the current status of these individuals across multiple domains (e.g., housing, employment, substance use); (2) gather additional administrative recidivism data to examine long-term offending; and (3) acquire information about the factors individuals associated with their decisions to desist from criminal activity, as well as circumstances associated with renewed criminal activity or desistence. Interviews were conducted with those that the study team were able to locate and additional administrative arrest and incarceration data were acquired for the full sample, providing recidivism follow-up over at least a 10-year period. Official administrative data were obtained from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (rearrests) and South Carolina Department of Corrections (reincarcerations). Arrest data span the entire arrest history (from first arrest through December 2015); reincarceration data span the period between the SVORI study prison release in 2005 and 2006 through June 2014. These data were obtained for the full sample of 479 South Carolina SVORI participants. Three components of interview data were collected. Desistance study interview data: 1 wave of in-person interviews was conducted with 208 study subjects who consented to participate in an interview. The research team used computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) to administer the survey, and interviews were conducted from September 2016 through March 2017. Life event data: The Life Events Calendar (LEC) is a tool used in qualitative and quantitative research to gather retrospective information about a person's life, experiences, and history. The approach is based on autobiographical memory and how entering events on a calendar or page help facilitate memory recall. LECs typically encompass periods of 5 years or less; this study's LEC covered a 10- to 12-year span to allow analysis since last contact with the study cohort. Data were collected from the 208 subjects who consented to be interviewed. SVORI interview data: This inventory includes files with select baseline and outcome data (e.g., self-reported employment, drug use, criminal behavior) for desistance study subjects who responded to follow-up interviews at Wave 2 (3-month), Wave 3 (9-month), and Wave 4 (15-month). This collection of administrative and interview data is organized into 14 data parts. Demographic data includes information on age, gender, race, and education.

Abstract

Opportunity-focused, high-growth entrepreneurship and science-led innovation are crucial for continued economic growth and productivity. Working in these fields offers the opportunity for rewarding and high-paying careers. However, the majority of youth in developing countries do not consider either as job options, affecting their choices of what to study. Youth may not select these educational and career paths due to lack of knowledge, lack of appropriate skills, and lack of role models. We provide a scalable approach to overcoming these constraints through an online education course for secondary school students that covers entrepreneurial soft skills, scientific methods, and interviews with role models.

The study comprises three experimental trials provided Before and during COVID-19 pandemic in different regions of Ecuador. This catalog entry includes data from Experiment 1: Educational Zone 2/Municipality of Quito 2019-2020. The data from the other two experiments are also available in the catalog.

Experiment 1: Educational Zone 2/Municipality of Quito 2019-2020 In course of Showing Life Opportunities project we conducted a randomized control trial in high schools in Educational Zone 2, Ecuador and Municipality of Quito, Ecuador in 2019-2020; Students finish the program in July 2020. The intervention is an online education course that covers entrepreneurial soft skills, scientific methods, and interviews with role models. This course is taken by students at school (some students finish the program at school during COVID-19 outbreak). We work with mostly 14-19 year-old students (16,570 students). The experimental program covers 126 schools in Educational Zone 2 and 11 schools in Municipality of Quito. We randomly assign schools either to treatment (and receiving the entrepreneurship courses online), or placebo-control (receiving a placebo treatment of online courses from standard curricula) groups. We also cross-randomize the role models and evaluate set of nimble interventions to increase take-up.

The details of intervention can be found in AEA registry: Asanov, Igor and David McKenzie. 2020. Showing Life Opportunities: Increasing opportunity-driven entrepreneurship and STEM careers through online courses in schools. AEA RCT Registry. July 19.

Geographic coverage

Experiment 1: Municipality of Quito and Educational Zone 2 Educational Zone 2 has its administrative headquarters in the city of Tena, Napo province. Its covers provinces of Napo, Orellana and Pichincha, 8 districts (15D01, 22D01, 17D10, 17D11, 15D02, 17D12, 22D02, 22D03), its 16 cantons and 68 parishes. It has an area of 39,542.58 km². The educational zone 2 spread from east to the western border of the Ecuador. We cover students of age 14-18 in schools that has sufficient access to the internet and classes of the K10, K11, or K12. We included the municipality of Quito in the study to enrich the coverage of program by having large (capital) city in the sample.

Analysis unit

Student

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

All students in selected schools who were present in classes filled out the baseline questionnaire

Mode of data collection

Internet [int]

Research instrument

Questionnaires We execute three main sets of questioners. A. Internet (Online Based survey)

The survey consists of a multi-topic questionnaire administered to the students through online learning platform in school during normal educational hours before COVID-19 pandemic or at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. We collect next information: 1. Subject specific knowledge tests. Spanish, English, Statistics, Personal Initiative (only endline), Negotiations (only endline). 2. Career intentions, preferences, beliefs, expectations, and attitudes. STEM and entrepreneurial intentions, preferences, beliefs, expectations, and attitudes. 3. Psychological characteristics. Personal Initiative, Negotiations, General Cognitions (General Self-Efficacy, Youth Self-Efficacy, Perceived Subsidiary Self-Efficacy Scale, Self-Regulatory Focus, Short Grit Scale), Entrepreneurial Cognitions (Business Self-Efficacy, Identifying Opportunities, Business Attitudes, Social Entrepreneurship Standards). 4. Behavior in (incentivized) games: Other-regarding preferences (dictator game), tendency to cooperate (Prisoners Dilemma), Perseverance (triangle game), preference for honesty, creativity (unscramble game). 5. Other background information. Socioeconomic level, language spoken, risk and time preferences, trust level, parents background, big-five personality traits of student, cognitive abilities. Background information (5) collected only at the baseline. B. First follow-up Phone-based Survey Zone 2, Summer (Phone Based). The survey replicates by phone shorter version of the internet-based survey above. We collect next information: 1. Subject specific knowledge tests.
2. Career intentions, preferences, beliefs, expectations, and attitudes. 3. Psychological characteristics

C. (Second) Follow-up Phone-Based Survey, Winter, Zone 2, Highlands Educational Regime.

We execute multi-topic questionnaire by phone to capture the first life-outcomes of students who finished the school. We collect next information:

1. Life Outcome 1- Education. The set of questions that aims to measure the learning success, career/study intentions, propensity to plan and approach others with studying tasks, entrepreneurial intentions.
2. Life Outcome 2- Labor. The set of questions that aims to measure employment status and income, job searching behavior, time devoted for working/business, salary expectations and knowledge about the careers, self-initiated contribution to the family.
3. Personal Initiative/Negotiations related and other measures. The set of questions that aim to measure level of personal initiative, negotiation strategies, pregnancy rate, gender stereotypes, math/STEM self-efficacy, gender attitudes, parent-student communication effects.

Cleaning operations

Data Editing A. Internet, Online-based surveys. We extracted the raw data generated on online platform from each experiment and prepared it for research purposes. We made several pre-processing steps of data: 1. We transform the raw data generated on platform in standard statistical software (R/STATA) readable format. 2. We extracted the answer for each item for each student for each survey (Baseline, Midline, Endline). 3. We cleaned duplicated students and duplicated answers for each item in each survey based on administrative data, performance and information given by students on platform. 4. In case of baseline survey, we standardized items/scales but also kept the raw items.

B. Phone-based surveys. The phone-based surveys are collected with help of advanced CATI kit. It contains all cases (attempts to call) and indication if the survey was effective. The data is cleaned to be ready for analysis. The data is anonymized but contains unique anonymous student id for merging across datasets.