| Abstract: | This research tests the hypothesis that children who grow up in families that carefully and consistently monitor children's behavior will be less delinquent than children in families where supervision is lax and/or haphazard. Although research operationalizing direct supervision in family interactional terms has supported this hypothesis, research using structural proxies for direct supervision (i.e., family size, broken home, and employed mother) has tended to show negligible effects. This research tests the direct supervision hypothesis using a more parsimonious structural proxy — the ratio of adults to children in a household. It is hypothesized that this ratio will be negatively related to delinquency, and that it will be a stronger predictor of delinquency than more common structural measures. Using data from the 1986 wave of the Monitoring the Future survey (Bachman, Johnston, and O'Malley, 1986), bivariate and multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models reveal that none of the structural variables, including the ratio of adults to children, are good predictors of delinquency. These results support Wells and Rankin's (1958) contention that family structural proxies are inadequate for testing the specific family functional processes on which direct supervision hinges. |
