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is the International Honor So ci ety in Psychology, found ed in 1929 for the pur pos es of encouraging, stim u lat ing, and maintaining ex cel lence in schol ar ship, and advancing the sci ence of psy chol ogy. Mem ber ship is open to gradu ate and under gradu ate students 58 SUMMER 2015 PSI CHI JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Jessor (2008) has recently called attention to description versus explanation in cross-cultural and cross-national comparative scholarship on adolescent development, particularly, the etiology of adolescent problem behaviors. In the current study, we were interested in testing to what extent problem behavior theory replicated in samples of 10,310 adolescents from 8 distinct developmental contexts, including Asian, Eastern and Western European, North American, and Eurasian/Muslim cultures. Path analyses by country samples as well as follow-up multigroup analyses provided evidence of great similarities across cultures in the links among two protective factor domains (controls protection and support protection), three risk factor domains (models risk, opportunity risk, and vulnerability risk), and the problem behavior syndrome, operationalized by vandalism, general deviance, school misconduct, theft, and assault measures. This evidence adds to a growing body of scholarship that provides support for similarities in explanation, despite many observed differences in description.

Using a sample of college students (N = 904) from the "Bible Belt," this study examines the effect of religiosity and self-control on late adolescents' delay in initiating sexual intercourse or oral sex. Findings from logistic regressions provide evidence that for each one unit increase in self-control, the odds of a male remaining a virgin or of delaying oral sex increased by a factor of 1.82 and 2.84, respectively, while for females, the odds of not engaging in oral sex increased by a factor of 1.67. In addition to the effect of self-control, a one unit increase in religiosity results in the odds of a male remaining a virgin by a factor of 3.86 and 3.30, respectively. For females the odds are increased by a factor of 4.13 and 2.60, respectively. Mediation tests also provided evidence that self-control mediated the effects by religiosity on both dependent measures. Thus, both religiosity and self-control independently and additively function as key social control mechanisms that promote late adolescent health.