Substance Abuse and Social Deviance:

The authors discuss adolescent substance abuse as a manifestation of social deviance. Theories of adolescent deviance are reviewed in light of their contributions to understanding troubled youth. A youth assessment framework is developed to provide a systematic means of linking theories to specific treatment strategies.     

The Dynamic Relationship between Unhealthy Weight Control and Adolescent Friendships: A Social Network Approach

Although adolescence marks a vulnerable stage for peer influence on health behavior, little is known about the longitudinal and dynamic relationship between adolescent friendship and weight control. The current study aims to explain these dynamic processes among a sample of 1156 American adolescents in grades 9–11 (48.6% girls, 23.4% European American, 25.2% African American) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Stochastic actor-oriented models were fit to examine changes in friendship networks and unhealthy weight control across two waves. The findings support a bidirectional relationship where weight control predicts future friendship seeking and friendship seeking predicts future weight control. The findings also indicate that adolescents prefer friends with similar weight control patterns. Taken together, the results of the current study indicate that adolescent friendships play an integral role in the development of unhealthy weight control and thus can be used to identify adolescents at risk and serve as targets within preventive interventions.     

Early Adolescent Social and Overt Aggression: Examining the Roles of Social Anxiety and Maternal Psychological Control

This study examined the factors contributing to the self-reported use of social and overt aggression among 745 10–14-year-old European American and Latino adolescents. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that dispositional social evaluative anxiety was uniquely positively associated with boys’ and girls’ social aggression and negatively associated with boys’ overt aggression. Maternal psychological control was positively associated with overt aggression for all boys, but with social aggression only for Latino boys. Although maternal psychological control also was associated with girls’ use of overt aggression, this effect was stronger among older than among younger females. The relationship between maternal psychological control and girls’ social aggression was mediated by social evaluative anxiety. Implications for elevated levels of social evaluative anxiety are discussed within a social cognitive theory perspective and for maternal psychological control within a social learning theory perspective.Received Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Michigan State University. Research interests include the interacting influences of individual differences and contextual factors on child and adolescent aggression.Research interests include examining the familial and peer systemic influences on child and adolescent aggression, individual differences influencing child and adolescent aggression, and interventions to reduce bullying behavior in peer groups.Received Ph.D. in School Psychology from Mississippi State University. Research interests include developing interventions in the classroom for disruptive behaviors, increasing prosocial behaviors, and decreasing aggression.     

The Importance of Family and School Domains in Adolescent Deviance: African American and Caucasian Youth

Previous work has documented the similar importance of developmental domains in accounting for adolescent deviance in different racial/ethnic groups (e.g., Vazsonyi A. T., and Flannery, D. J., 1997, J. Early Adolesc. 17(3): 271–293). The current investigation is a replication and extension of this line of work. It examined the importance of the family (closeness, monitoring, and conflict) and school (grades, homework time, educational aspirations, and commitment) domains on a sample of adolescent (mean age = 16.4 years) African American and Caucasian youth (N = 809). The following important findings were made: (a) developmental processes including family and school domain variables and deviance were very similar for African American and Caucasian youth; (b) both developmental domains revealed independent predictive relationships with a number of different measures of adolescent deviance in both groups; and (c) the 2 domains uniquely accounted for 25% and 37% of the variance explained respectively in African American and Caucasian adolescent total deviance.     

The Effects of Adolescent Activities on Delinquency: A Differential Involvement Approach

T. Hirschi’s (1969, Causes of Delinquency. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA) control theory proposes that involvement, as an element of the social bond, should reduce delinquency. But, research studies have found that the effect of involvement is rather weak. This study reformulates Hirschi’s involvement hypothesis by posing involvement as a social setting variable and a differential factor. Certain activities provide a social setting favorable to the development of the social bond and the reduction in delinquent association. The reformulated hypothesis is examined based on a sample of Grade 7–12 students in a Western Canadian city. The results reveal that school- and family-related activities strengthen the social bond and reduce delinquent association and delinquency. In contrast, other conventional activities such as spending time with friends and dating have the opposite effects. In addition, the indirect effect of differential involvement on delinquency through the social bond and delinquent association is stronger than its direct effect. Thus, the undesirable effects of the less-positive activities on delinquency may be buffered or reduced by strengthening the social bond and reducing delinquent association.Siu Kwong Wong is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Brandon University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Washington State University. His major research interests are in the study of delinquency and social disorganization.     

The Association Between Parental Rearing Dimensions and Adolescent Psychopathology: A Cross-Cultural Study

Research on parental rearing dimensions faced ethnocentric criticism for mainly focusing on adolescents in Western industrialized countries. Over the past decade, the phenomenon of anxious parenting, so called “helicopter parenting”, gained attention in popular media as well as scholarly publications in addition to support and psychological control. Whether these parenting dimensions, which were associated with different health outcomes in adolescents, were only occurring in the Western world or are visible cross-culturally, has not been sufficiently studied. Therefore, it is unclear whether these links exist also for adolescents from other parts of the world. Additionally, the involvement of fathers in child rearing continues to be neglected in adolescent psychopathology research. The current cross-cultural study tested the association of maternal and paternal rearing dimensions with youth internalizing and externalizing psychopathology in a sample of 2415 adolescents (56% female, 15.33 years, SD?=?0.61) from eight countries (Argentina, France, Germany, Greece, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, and Turkey). Hierarchical regression models showed that internalizing symptomatology was associated with mothers’ support, psychological control, and anxious rearing as well as fathers’ psychological control up and above predictors like country and mother’s level of education. For predicting externalizing symptomatology, mother’s anxious rearing, mother’s psychological control, and father’s support as well as father’s psychological control were significant up and above adolescents’ gender, standard of living, and country. To conclude, across countries, anxious rearing and psychological control experienced from both parents were substantially linked with adolescent mental health.

     

Socioeconomic Context, Social Support, and Adolescent Mental Health: A Multilevel Investigation

This study examined whether the impact of contextual-level socioeconomic disadvantage on adolescent mental health is contingent upon individual-level perceptions of social support. Data are from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a panel survey of a nationally representative United States sample (analytic N=18,417) of students in 7th through 12th grade. Effects of social support and social context on both internalizing problems (depressive symptoms) and externalizing problems (minor delinquency and violent behavior) are analyzed. Contextual-level socioeconomic disadvantage is positively associated with depressive symptoms, negatively associated with minor delinquency, and not directly associated with violent behavior. High perceived support from family, friends, and other adults offsets poor mental health, but is most protective in areas of low socioeconomic disadvantage. The mental health benefits of perceived social support are dampened in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, compared to advantaged areas. Results suggest that interventions targeting only individual- or family-level processes within disadvantaged contexts may be inadequate at stemming psychological distress among adolescents. Richard G. Wight, Assistant Research Sociologist, conducts life course mental health research in the UCLA Department of Community Health Sciences. His work emphasizes the intersection of individual- and contextual-level factors that impact health within dyads, families, and neighborhoods. Amanda L. Botticello is a doctoral student in the UCLA Department of Community Health Sciences, where her work addresses the reciprocal relationships between depressive symptoms and problem drinking among adolescents. Carol S. Aneshensel is a Professor of Community Health Sciences at UCLA, where she applies principals of social stratification and life course theory to the analysis of quantitative data to better understand disparities in mental health risks.     

Individual and Sibling Characteristics: Parental Differential Treatment and Adolescent Externalizing Behaviors

Adolescents’ reports of parental differential treatment have been linked to increased externalizing behaviors. The current study investigated whether adolescent self-esteem and sibling relationship characteristics (age-spacing and sibling relationship quality) moderated associations between parental differential treatment and later externalizing behavior. Data was gathered at two assessments from 708 sibling pairs (94% White; 51% male; same-gender pairs <4 years apart in age). Older/younger siblings were aged M_Assessment1?=?13.5/12.1 and M_Assessment2?=?16.2/14.7 years. We found that higher levels of maternal differential treatment predicted greater residualized gains in externalizing behavior among older siblings who were (a) the same age as their sibling or near-to and had low self-esteem or (b) three years older than their sibling and had higher self-esteem. Higher levels of paternal differential treatment predicted greater residual gains in externalizing for older siblings with wider age ranges (regardless of self-esteem), and among older siblings with high levels of self-esteem (regardless of age difference). Surprisingly, maternal differential treatment was protective in one case: for adolescents with low self-esteem who were at least three years older than their siblings, maternal differential treatment predicted reduced externalizing behaviors. Paternal differential treatment was protective for more youth than maternal differential treatment: older siblings with low self-esteem who experienced paternal differential treatment exhibited decreased externalizing behaviors across adolescence, regardless of age difference. The findings highlight the importance of self-esteem and sibling age-spacing as particularly salient contextual influences in older siblings’ perceptions of maternal and paternal differential treatment, and that maternal and especially paternal differential treatment does not always serve as a risk factor for externalizing problems.     

Effects of Deviant Peer Association on Adolescent Alcohol Consumption: A Growth Mixture Modeling Analysis

This study examined concurrent and lagged effects of deviant peer association on levels of alcohol use for distinctive trajectories of drinking from ages 14–18 years, while controlling for age, paternal education, community size, and conduct problems. Longitudinal data were available from a secondary data archive of male and female German adolescents (N = 1,619). Conditional latent growth mixture modeling analysis indicated consistent concurrent effects of deviant peer association (specified as time-varying covariate) on alcohol use for the regular users group, but not any of the other drinking trajectory groups. Very few lagged effects of deviant peers association on alcohol use were found, and thus the social influence hypothesis received little empirical support. Overall, findings suggest the need to consider heterogeneity in the study of peer characteristics and alcohol use for both male and female adolescents.

A Longitudinal Family-Level Model of Arab Muslim Adolescent Behavior Problems

Arab-American Muslim adolescents in immigrant families face a number of challenges that put them at risk for behavior problems. This study of Arab-American Muslim Adolescents and their relatively recent immigrant mothers tested a longitudinal family-level model of adolescent behavior problems. Mother-adolescent dyads (N = 530) completed measures of maternal and adolescent stressors, active and avoidance coping, and social support; maternal distress; quality of mother–child relationship; and adolescent behavior problems at Time 1 and approximately 18 months later. The youth were between the ages of 11 and 15 years at Time 1 and 48.7% were girls. Longitudinal analyses were conducted using latent change modeling with change scores from Time 1 and Time 2 data. Social support facilitated active coping for both mothers and adolescents. Although maternal avoidance coping mediated maternal stressors and its effect on maternal distress, maternal stressors and maternal distress were not related to adolescent behavior problems. The only factor mitigating the effects of adolescent stressors on adolescent behavior problems was the quality of the mother–child relationship. These findings suggest that adolescents are insulated from maternal stress and distress as long as there is a good mother–child relationship.     

Understanding the Association Between Maltreatment History and Adolescent Risk Behavior by Examining Popularity Motivations and Peer Group Control

The purpose of the present study was to examine how peer group processes of pressure and control and individual motivations for popularity would add to, and moderate the relationship between, childhood maltreatment and risky behavior in adolescence. A total of 1558 youth (804 girls) from three high schools in Ontario, Canada (M age = 15.02 years, SD = .86) reported on their alcohol use, delinquent behavior, childhood experiences of physical and emotional maltreatment and neglect, peer group processes involving control and individual popularity motivations. Regression analyses showed that, beyond the significant contributions of childhood maltreatment, peer group control predicted risky alcohol use and delinquent behavior. Peer group control and popularity motivations exacerbated the negative effect of physical maltreatment on delinquent behavior. Boys’ experiences of peer group control were more strongly linked to alcohol use and delinquent behavior than girls’. These results suggest that there is a significant window of opportunity during adolescence where the peer group context can exacerbate or buffer childhood experiences.

Institutionalization of Children with Disabilities in Croatia: Social Workers' Perspectives

Abstract

This study aims to advance understanding of social workers’ perceptions of the circumstances necessitating and preventing the placement of children with disabilities (CwDs) in institutions. This retrospective study involved thematic analyses of one focus group (n?=?7) and semi-structured individual interviews (n?=?12). Participants included social work professionals with experience providing welfare services for CwDs and their families. In effort to prevent separation of CwDs from their families, results suggest a need for continued monitoring of deinstitutionalization of CwDs alongside increased availability, accessibility, and quality of childcare, alternative child welfare and family support services.     

Exploring the Association Between Insecure Attachment Styles and Adolescent Autonomy in Family Decision Making: A Differentiated Approach

The present investigation focuses on the associations between adolescents’ insecure attachment styles (i.e., anxiety and avoidance) and their autonomous functioning in family decision making. In line with recent insights in the construct of adolescent autonomy, we combined two perspectives on autonomy, differentiating between the degree of independent versus dependent functioning and the self-endorsed and pressuring motives underlying (in)dependent functioning. A longitudinal sample of 327 adolescents (age range = 13–20 years; 64 % girls) completed questionnaires on attachment to the mother and father and on both autonomy operationalisations on two measurement moments spanning a 1-year interval. Structural equation modeling showed that attachment avoidance generally was unrelated to the degree of independent decision making and the motives underlying independent decision making, but related to more pressuring motives for dependent decision making. Anxiety, on the other hand, was associated with a lower degree of independent decision making as well as with more pressuring motives for both independent and dependent decision making. Cross-lagged paths were generally in line with these findings. Theoretical implications are outlined in the discussion.     

Social Support and Low-Income,Urban Mothers: Longitudinal Associations with Adolescent Delinquency

The current study examined the role of engaged parenting in explaining longitudinal associations between maternal perceptions of social network support and whether youth engage in delinquent behaviors during the transition into adolescence. The sample included 432 low-income, African American and Latino youth (49% female) and their mothers participating in “Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three City Study”. Results from longitudinal SEM analyses demonstrated that social network support was associated positively with mothers’ engaged parenting as youth transitioned into early adolescence. Engaged parenting, which functioned as a mediating variable, was associated with less youth delinquency during transitions into middle adolescence. Taken together, social network supports appeared to facilitate mothers’ abilities to remain engaged with their children and to deter youth from becoming involved in delinquent behaviors.     

Social Intelligence and Academic Achievement as Predictors of Adolescent Popularity

This study compared the effects of social intelligence and cognitive intelligence, as measured by academic achievement, on adolescent popularity in two school contexts. A distinction was made between sociometric popularity, a measure of acceptance, and perceived popularity, a measure of social dominance. Participants were 512, 14–15 year-old adolescents (56% girls, 44% boys) in vocational and college preparatory schools in Northwestern Europe. Perceived popularity was significantly related to social intelligence, but not to academic achievement, in both contexts. Sociometric popularity was predicted by an interaction between academic achievement and social intelligence, further qualified by school context. Whereas college bound students gained sociometric popularity by excelling both socially and academically, vocational students benefited from doing well either socially or academically, but not in combination. The implications of these findings were discussed.     

Preadolescents' Perceptions of Females' Body Size and Shape: Evolutionary and Social Learning Perspectives

One hundred and sixty-five Mexican American and Euro-American preadolescents' and their parents' perceptions of healthy and attractive female body sizes and shapes were examined in this study. Participants' perceptions of healthy and attractive female figures were assessed using a pictorial measure that systematically manipulated 3 levels of body size and 4 levels of body shape (i.e., waist-to-hip ratio; WHR). All participants tended to perceive females' with small WHRs as most healthy and attractive looking, while preadolescents expressed a preference for thinner female figures than did adults. Results further suggest that Euro-American and Mexican American participants report similar preferences for females' body sizes and shapes. However, little agreement was found between preadolescents' and their parents' preferences. Principles of evolutionary theory and social learning theory are used to interpret these findings, and implications for preadolescents' perceptions of their own developing bodies, body image, and related eating behaviors are discussed.