No abstract

Protective and risk factors were examined in three samples, each of about 500 boys. Cross-sectional analyses examined a large number of independent variables for their potential protective and risk effects on different levels of seriousness of boys' delinquency. The results showed that protective and risk effects often co-occurred in the same variables, that few variables had risk effects only, and none had protective effects oniy. Protective effects were as likely to promote nondelinquency as to suppress serious delinquency, whereas risk effects were as likely to suppress nondelinquency as to promote serious delinquency. Certain variables were mostly associated with distinctions between nondelinquency and minor delinquency, other variables were related to the distinction between minor delinquency and serious delinquency, and a third group of variables was associated with both distinctions. Developmental analyses indicated that the magnitude of protective and risk effects increased with age. Implications of the findings for research and clinical practice are discussed.

No abstract

The study examines the relationship between reading and delinquency for three large community samples of first-, fourth-, and seventh-grade African-American and white boys. Reading was correlated with delinquency, independent of neighborhood, SES, ethnicity, and family involvement effects. Although more African-American boys were delinquent than white boys, the likelihood of delinquency for boys with lower reading performance was the same in each ethnic group. Older boys with poor reading performance did not have a higher probability of delinquency than younger boys with poor reading performance. Thus, the association between reading performance and delinquency appears constant over the age range studied. When attention problems was entered as a control variable, it overshadowed reading performance in its association with delinquency. The seriousness of delinquent acts linearly increased the worse the reading performance for white boys in all three grades and for African-American boys in two out of the three grades. However, this linear relationship disappeared when attention problems were taken into account.

Although there is a common core of agreement in parental perceptions of their preschool-age sons' problem behavior, perceptions of 107 parents became more concordant as fathers increased the amount of time they spent with their sons. At least within the context of a sample who were at risk for developing abuse of alcohol or other substances and antisocial behavior, fathers who spent less time with their sons perceived them to be less troubled than mothers perceived them to be.