NCJ Number
202698
Journal
Social Forces Volume: 82 Issue: 1 Dated: September 2003 Pages: 355-397
Date Published
September 2003
Length
43 pages
Annotation
This study incorporated parent and peer relationship measures from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine whether parents treated more physically developed daughters differently from their less developed peers and whether more developed girls were part of friendship networks that were more conducive to delinquency than the networks of less developed girls.
Abstract
The Add Health project currently involves two waves of data and multiple data components. The study relied on the self-administered in-school questionnaire (n=90,118), the first in-home surveys conducted in 1995 (n=20,745), and the second in-home survey conducted in 1996 (n=14,738). The final sample for this study consisted of 5,477 female respondents who were interviewed during all 3 periods of data collection in 1995-96. Three types of delinquent behaviors were assessed: involvement in "party" deviance (smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, lying to parents, school truancy, smoking marijuana, and engaging in disorderly conduct); minor delinquency (painting graffiti, shoplifting, driving a car without permission, stealing something worth less than $50, vandalism, and stealing an item worth more than $50); and serious delinquency involvement (a mixture of violent and property offenses of a relatively serious nature). The independent variables were grouped into four categories: pubertal development, parental relationship factors, friendship relationship factors, and background individual factors. Pubertal development was measured through interview questions related to absolute level of physical development and comparative level of physical development. Three measures of the parent-child relationship were assessed: trust, autonomy, and conflict. A unique strength of this study was the incorporation of adolescent social network measures. Earlier pubertal development and more advanced development were associated with all three types of delinquency, with the strength of the association being strongest for "party" deviance. Conflict with parents, trust and autonomy from parents, exposure to peer deviance, and involvement in romantic relationships mediated the puberty-delinquency association; however, the relative importance of each of these mechanisms varied by the context of delinquency and the indicators of pubertal development that were used. 5 tables, 25 notes, 92 references, and appended data on frequency of various types of delinquency by relative pubertal status