USF St. Petersburg campus Faculty Publications

Family factors, theft, vandalism, and major deviance among a multiracial/multiethnic sample of adolescent girls.

SelectedWorks Author Profiles:

Frank A. Biafora

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1997

ISSN

1053-0789

Abstract

This article reports on a study of 503 African-American, Hispanic, and White non-Hispanic adolescent girls attending public schools in Miami, Florida, The primary objectives of the study were to determine the prevalence of 13 self-reported delinquent behaviors in the sample, to compare these rates among the three groups of students, and to explore the predictive influences of several family factors that correlate with delinquency. It was found that 37.5% of the sample engaged in one or more acts of serious delinquency, with African-Americans reporting they had engaged in significantly more of these behaviors. The best predictors of theft/vandalism were low family pride and family substance abuse for Hispanics, low family communication for African-Americans, and low family pride for White non-Hispanics. The findings indicate that traditional family factors that have been used repeatedly to understand delinquency by male adolescents were not strong predictors of delinquency among the adolescent girls in the sample.

Comments

Abstract only. Full-text article is available only through licensed access provided by the publisher. Published in Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 6(10), 71-87. DOI: 10.1023/B:JOSD.0000015190.15162.9d

Language

en_US

Publisher

Maney Publishing

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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