Psychosocial control characteristics and adolescent delinquent behaviour

Abstract

This thesis reports empirical tests of a psychosocial control theory of delinquent behaviour using multiple delinquency measures. An extension of Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory, the psychosocial approach considers not only social determinants of delinquency but also the personality characteristics of impulsiveness and emotional empathy. The formulation of this revised control perspective is discussed in relation to the literature on individual differences in delinquent activity. The present investigation undertook to develop new measures where existing instruments with satisfactory psychometric properties were unavailable. As a result, a new self-reported delinquency scale for use with present day Australian youth and measures of two social control variables (namely, belief in the moral validity of the law and liking for school), all with demonstrated reliability and validity, were developed prior to testing the psychosocial control theory. The first test of the theory involved a crosssectional study of the relationships between psychosocial control variables and self-reported delinquency in 793 Australian secondary school students. The results confirmed the finding of overseas research that delinquency is inversely associated with the strength of perceived social control. More importantly, multivariate analysis results revealed that the personal control characteristic of impulsiveness contributed to variance in delinquency over and above the contribution from social control characteristics. A combination of social control, personal control, and demographic variables was found to account for 51.56% of the variance in self-reported delinquency. These results are consistent with a psychosocial control conceptualization of delinquent involvement. The second main study compared the psychosocial control characteristics of 103 pairs of official delinquents and nondelinquents, whose demographic characteristics had been matched on a pairwise basis. The results demonstrated that both social control variables and impulsiveness were important in discriminating between official delinquents and nondelinquents. This finding again shows the relevance of the psychosocial control approach to the understanding of adolescent delinquency. Limitations of the present research and the complex nature of delinquent activity are considered in discussing directions of future research. Implications of the present findings are also discussed. Show more