How Adolescent Destructive Deviance Improves Lifetime Health Through Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Despite the fact that some prior studies indicated that destructive deviance in adolescence can destroy individuals’ whole life, in current study, based on the career stage theory, we propose a theoretical model indicating that even a high level of destructive deviance in adolescence can also improve individuals’ life by encouraging them to enter the entrepreneurship (have their own business), which in turn can bring them with a better lifetime health after retirement. Employing a relatively large and representative dataset from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979) with 12,686 participants across different social classes in United States and more than 35-year career tracks, we indeed find that although the adolescent destructive deviance is negatively related to the lifetime health, entrepreneurship will suppress this main effect, meaning that teenagers with a high level of destructive deviance are likely to enter entrepreneurship (i.e., owning business) which can bring many benefits to their lifetime health even after 30 years. Potential theoretical contributions and implications are also discussed.