Friday, 14 January 2005 - 8:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Delinquency

Risk and Resilience Factors Associated with Delinquent Behavior among African American Adolescent Males

Juvenile crime is a problem of increasing concern to many citizens in the United States. Citizens are concerned with not only the number of offenses committed by juveniles but also with the level of increasing violence associated with juvenile crime. The majority of research concerning risk and resilience factors associated with delinquency has been done with predominantly non-Hispanic white sample. Those studies that have included African American youth have had insufficient power to examine risk and resilience factors within specific racial/ethnic groups.This study explored putative factors associated with juvenile offending among a sample of African American adolescent males (n=425). The independent variables in this study were academic achievement, religiosity, parenting styles and discrimination. The dependent variables were delinquent behavior and arrest. The data used in this study were from a larger NIDA funded longitudinal study which utilized computer-guided structured interviews. The participants for the original study were selected via random sampling from all students attending middle school in Miami-Dade County. The study examined the hypotheses that African American males retrospectively reporting (a) high academic achievement, (b) high religiosity, (c) authoritarian parenting and (d) low perceptions of discrimination are less likely to be involved in delinquent behavior and are also less likely to be arrested. Results indicated that among African American adolescent males, delinquent behavior had a significant relationship (p<.05) with academic achievement, perceived discrimination and the interaction between perceived discrimination and experienced discrimination. Arrest was significantly related to academic achievement (p<.001), religious perception (p<.05), and church attendance (p<.05). Neither dependent variable was significantly related to parenting styles. These findings are discussed in regard to their implications for social work practice and social welfare policy.

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