As mass incarceration has proliferated in recent decades, there has been a corresponding increase in research examining outcomes among children of incarcerated parents (e.g., see Hagan & Foster, 2014; Uggen & McElrath, 2014). Despite the gains in knowledge this schol- arship has produced, the gendered effects of parental incarceration for offspring into adult- hood remain poorly understood. Most of the quantitative parental incarceration research to date has examined fathers’ incarceration only; the body of research on mothers’ incarceration is smaller by comparison and mainly qualitative in nature. Even fewer studies compare whether the effects of parental incarceration differ for daughters and sons. In addition, most studies utilize childhood measures focusing on behavioral outcomes among children from birth to age 18 (e.g., see Murray, Farrington, & Sekol, 2012 for a review). Therefore, the potentially sex-specific impact of parental incarceration for offspring into adulthood remains an important area of scholarly inquiry (Muftic, Bouffard, & Armstrong, 2016). As scholars increasingly have called for use of life-course models in studies of this type (Mears & Siennick, 2016; Muftic et al., 2016), a gendered pathways theoretical framework has particu- lar value for examining these issues as it is both developmental and gender focused.
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