Does the Relationship Between Poor Reading and Delinquency Hold for Males of Different Ages and Ethnic Groups?

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.