Identifying the Mechanisms whereby Family Religiosity Influences the Probability of Adolescent Antisocial Behavior

Abstract

ENTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF RELIGIOSITY AND ADOLESCENT CONDUCT PROBLEMS: SPECIFYING THE MEDIATING MECHANISMSBeginning with the classical theorists, sociology has stressed the social control function of religion (Durkheim, 1951 ; Weber, 1958). To the extent that religion serves this purpose, one might expect that religious adolescents would be less inclined to engage in delinquent behavior than their irreligous peers. Overall, social scientific research supports this hypothesis. A few early studies failed to find a relationship between religiosity and delinquency (e.g., Hirschi & Stark, 1969), but this research suffered from a variety of methodological flaws. More recent studies have corrected for these limitations and virtually all have found the expected negative relationship between the two constructs (for reviews see Johnson, Li, Larson, & McCullough, 2000; Sherkat and Ellison, 1999). Indeed, a recent meta-analysis (Baier & Wright, 2001) of 60 studies published between 1969 and 1998 indicated that religious beliefs and behaviors exert at least a moderate deterrent effect on delinquent and criminal behavior. The finding that religiosity deters delinquency does not explain the mechanisms whereby religion produces this effect. The present study tests the hypothesis that religious adolescents are at lower risk for delinquent behavior than irreligious youth because they tend to be committed to traditional values and to affiliate with conventional peers.In addition to investigating the manner in which adolescent religious commitment discourages conduct problems, we test various hypotheses regarding the avenues whereby parental religiosity operates to reduce the chances that an adolescent will engage in delinquent behavior. Besides devoting little attention to the theoretical processes that account for the association between adolescent religiosity and delinquency, past research has largely ignored the manner in which parental religiosity either directly or indirectly influences the deviant behavior of offspring (Burkett, 1993). We develop a model that specifies the link between parental and adolescent religiosity and the processes whereby these two constructs operate to discourage delinquent behavior. We test this model using two samples of adolescents and their parents. The first consists of approximately 400 White families living in the Midwest, whereas the second is comprised of roughly 800 African American families, half of which reside in the Southeast and half of which live in the Midwest.The use of these two samples allows us to examine the extent to which hypothesized relationships hold across groups with different religious involvements and traditions. Model replication rarely occurs in the social sciences, but is a necessary prelude to the development of scientific theory (Weisz, 1978; Conger et al,1995). Although religious involvement tends to be much greater among African American than European American families (Aldous and Ganey, 1999), we expect the avenues whereby religiosity influences risk for delinquency to be the same for the two groups. A few years ago, Rowe, Vazsonyi, and Flannery (1994) reviewed an extensive body of evidence indicating that correlations between child adjustment and a wide variety of family, peer, and school variables do not differ by race or ethnicity. They concluded that developmental processes are invariant across racial and ethnic groups. In keeping with their conclusion, we assume that the theoretical mechanisms that link religiosity and delinquency are similar across cultural groups.ADOLESCENT RELIGIOSITY AND DELINQUENCYWe noted that prior studies have devoted little attention to the theoretical processes that account for the negative relationship between adolescent religiosity and involvement in delinquent behavior. Criminological studies have provided strong evidence that delinquents question traditional morality and spend their time with deviant friends (Elliott, Huizinga, & Menard, 1989; Gottredson & Hirschi, 1990; Hirschi, 1969; Thornberry, 1987; Thornberry et al. …