An Ecological Approach to Understanding Youth Violence: The Mediating Role of Substance Use

Abstract

The authors tested an ecological model that posits mediating variables (substance use and mental health) in the association between ecological factors (family closeness, school closeness, and peer closeness) and youth violence in a sample of 4,783 adolescents. Model including substance use present significantly less total effect between ecological factors and youth violence than do models without substance use. Additional probing of significant mediation effect using the Sobel test was performed and suggested that substance use did function as a mediator in the hypothesized path. Considerations of adolescent violence should recognize the possible role of ecological factors and how their influence may vary by substance use. KeywordsFamily closeness; school closeness; peer closeness; substance use; violence; ecological model Adolescent violence has been a great concern in American society for over two decades. According to Marcus (2005), youth are more vulnerable to violence than any other age group. Wiesner and Windle (2004) state, "adolescence is known as the peak period for delinquent activity on the aggregate level and characterized by changes and transitions in multiple domains (e.g. pubertal development, increasing engagement in or experimentation with various deviant behaviors, identity development, initiation of romantic relationships)" (p. 432). Data collected through the National Crime Victimization Survey in 1991 show that the most likely age group to be involved in serious violent crimes were adolescents (Snyder & Sickmund, 1995).Many statistics have been published about adolescent violence, previously from research in juvenile justice and school settings. Juvenile justice research shows that violent adolescent crimes increased significantly from the 1980s to the mid 1990s, reaching its peak in 1994. In 2000, there were over two million arrests of adolescents under the age of 18, and of these arrests, nearly 100,000 were for violent offenses (Snyder, 2002). By 2001, "juveniles accounted for 17% of all arrests and 15% of all violent crime arrests" (Snyder, 2003, p.1).Correspondence should be directed to Dr. Sung Seek Moon, School of Social Work, University of Texas at Arlington, 211 S. Cooper St., Arlington, TX 76019; sungmoon@uta.edu. (2003), there was a 59% increase in female adolescents' involvement with the juvenile justice system for all juvenile offenses between 1990 and 1999. NIH Public AccessData from the Add Health Survey in 2001 showed that as much as 33% of high school students had been involved in at least one physical fight and 7.5% of these fights resulted in injury (Marcus, 2005). Data collected through the Center for Disease Control (2002) showed that, of those students who were involved in at least one physical fight in the 12 months prior to the survey, 54% had also been involved in fights in two or more instances, and of the students who had reported being injured during a fight, 37% also reported that they had been injured in fights in two or more instances. Literature Rev...

Ecological Factors of Being Bullied Among Adolescents: a Classification and Regression Tree Approach

“…Some studies reported that poor parent-children relationships and communications increased the probability of victimization by bullying (Bowers et al 1994; Moon et al 2010; Stevens et al 2002). Jaynes (2008) found that parental involvement was a predictor of being bullied by investigating the relationship between parental involvement and being bullied among 7th to 12th grade students.…”

Exploratory Research on Protective Factors Associated with Youth Offending: The Case of East Gojjam Zone, Ethiopia

“…However, Moon, Patton and Rao (2011) noted that susceptibility to adversity is heightened during this period of accelerated maturation and social transition, in the human life cycle. Of several problem behaviors observed at this age, youth offending is becoming the most pressing issue throughout the world.…”

Preventing Substance Abuse Among Adolescents: Evaluation of an Integrated Model Combining Life Skills Traning and Parent Traning

“…Important eco developmental predictors of substance use emerge from a number of social levels and systems. For example, processes occurring within the family, such as communication (Noyori-Corbett & Moon, 2010), support (Guerrero et al, 2010), and positive parental involvement (Moon, Patton, & Rao, 2010) are negatively predictive of adolescent substance use and violence. Moreover, a number of studies have indicated that provision of parental warmth and support is associated with less adolescent substance use (Cleveland, Feinberg, & Greenber, 2010).…”

“…Furthermore, adolescents who had more time to spend with their parents had a tendency to show lower rates of alcohol and other substance use (Crawford & Novak, 2002;Hadley et al, 2016;Kuendig & Kuntsche, 2006). Similarly, processes occurring at school, such as school bonding and interest (Moon, Patton, & Rao, 2010), and processes occurring in the peer network, such as association with deviant or risk-taking peers (Casey & Beadnell, 2010), have been found to be strongly related to adolescent substance use. Processes that do not directly involve the adolescent are also predictive of adolescent substance use.…”

“…Processes that do not directly involve the adolescent are also predictive of adolescent substance use. Connections between the adolescent's contexts, such as parental involvement in school and parental monitoring of peers, are negatively predictive of substance use in adolescence (Moon, Patton, & Rao, 2010;Noyori-Corbett & Moon, 2010). Processes occurring in the parent's own ecosystem, such as social support for parents and parents' stressors, may affect adolescent risk-taking behaviors indirectly through their effects on parenting (Galambos, Sears, Almeida, & Kolaric, 1995).…”