Individual, Family, and Peer-Related Factors on Adolescent-to-Parent Violence

Background and Purpose: Adolescent-to-parent violence (APV) has recently become a subject of significant academic interest. Despite this, most studies investigating factors associated with APV have concentrated on individual and family-related factors in adolescents. This study incorporated peer-related factors and individual and family factors. Furthermore, recognizing the unclear relationship between gender and APV-related factors reported in previous research, this research also explored whether gender differences were found in the associations between individual, family, and peer-related factors and APV.

Methods: The data analyzed was from the 2018 Korean National Survey of the Present Status of Children (n = 2,510; 53.9% boys; mean age = 13.42 years).

Measures: Verbal APV was measured based on one item in which participants were asked how often they “swore at” their parents. Physical APV was measured by four items asking how often participants had “pushed parents, “threw objects at them”, “kicked them”, and “hit them with something.” In the analyses, both dependent variables were dichotomized in such a way that participants were coded with a score of 0 assigned if they had reported no acts of violence and a score of 1 assigned if they had reported exercising at least one act of violence toward their parents. Depression/anxiety symptoms were evaluated using 13 items from the Korean Child Behavior Checklist (Oh et al., 1997). Parent-to-child verbal abuse was assessed using four items from the Parent-Child Conflict Tactics Scales (PCCTS; Straus et al., 1998). Parent-to-child physical abuse was assessed using four items from the PCCTS. Parental warmth was assessed using the eight-item Parent-Child Relationship Inventory (Lee et al., 2008). Affiliation with deviant peers was assessed through five items that gauged friends' deviant behavior. Peer victimization was assessed using six items from Noh et al.'s (2006) validated Bullying Victimization Scale. Logistic regression analysis was used to examine the relationships between individual (age, depressive/anxiety symptoms), family (family structure, family economic status, parent-to-child verbal and physical abuse, parental warmth), and peer-related (affiliation with deviant peers, peer victimization) variables and two types of APV (verbal and physical). To explore potential gender differences in these relationships, logistic regression analyses for the two APV types were conducted separately for boys and girls.

Results: Depression/anxiety symptoms, parent-to-child verbal and physical abuse, parental warmth, affiliation with deviant peers, and peer victimization were associated with verbal and physical APV. Overall, individual, family, and peer-related factors associated with APV did not substantially differ across adolescent genders. Notably, peer victimization emerged as the most influential factor in increasing the risk of verbal and physical APV for both boys and girls.

Conclusions and Implications: The results provide evidence that APV is particularly affected by experiences of peer victimization within the school domain, beyond characteristics of the individual and family domains. The findings underscore the importance of implementing comprehensive prevention and resolution strategies for effectively preventing APV. These strategies should not only target the individual and family dynamics of adolescents but should also extend efforts to address and mitigate peer violence within the school environment.