Reconsidering the Broken Homes/Delinquency Relationship and Exploring Its Mediating Mechanism(s)*

Abstract

As a result of methodological limitations, prior research may have artificially attenuated the magnitude of the broken homes/delinquency relationship. As a result of theoretical limitations, prior research has achieved only limited success in identifying the mechanism through which broken homes may promote delinquency. The present study addresses both issues using a national probability sample of 1, 725 adolescents. Results suggest that divorce/separation early in the life course may be more strongly related to delinquency than prior research implies and that remarriage during adolescence may be strongly associated with status offending. Overall, results also suggest that association with deviant peers and attitudes favorable to delinquency account for the broken homes/delinquency relationship better than do a number of alternative explanations.

Parental Divorce: A Protection from Later Delinquency for Maltreated Children

“…Price and Kunz (2003) found in a meta-analysis of 72 studies that children from divorced homes have higher delinquency rates compared to children from intact homes. Heck and Walsh (2000) measured both delinquency and maltreatment more comprehensively and found that when controlling for family structure, the maltreatment to delinquency risk was significant, whereas Rebellon (2002) used a national probability sample of adolescents and identified that divorce experienced by younger children might be a stronger predictor of later delinquency than previous research had found.…”

“…For this sam ple of maltreated children, the only risk factor that was significantly related to later delinquency was whether their parents divorced-here this divorce outcome made later adjudication less likely for the youth when compared to youth from never-married families. This is somewhat surprising when reviewing more recent family functioning literature, which found higher delinquency rates for children and youth, with and without maltreatment histories, who experienced parental divorce (Heck & Walsh, 2000;Price & Kunz, 2003;Rebellon, 2002). These differential outcomes may be explained in that very limited research to date has tried to explain the maltreatment, delinquency, and family structure connections.…”

“…In previous research that has identified a link between poor family functioning and delinquency, broken homes (including divorce) have been widely studied as a cause of later juvenile delinquency adjudication (Amato & Keith, 1991;Patterson, Reid, & Dishon, 1992;Price & Kunz, 2003;Rebellon, 2002;Reifman, Villa, Amans, Rethinam, & Telesca, 2001;Wells & Rankin, 1991). However, there is still not a consensus as to the impact these family changes have on delinquency rates (Degarmo & Forgatch, 2005;Heck & Walsh, 2000), although three out of four youth in state correctional facilities experienced a parental divorce, separation, or their parents never marrying (Price & Kunz, 2003).…”

“…However, there is still not a consensus as to the impact these family changes have on delinquency rates (Degarmo & Forgatch, 2005;Heck & Walsh, 2000), although three out of four youth in state correctional facilities experienced a parental divorce, separation, or their parents never marrying (Price & Kunz, 2003). Previous research that has tried to provide clarity included studies that broadly defined families as intact or not (Rebellon, 2002), defined these changes as marital transitions (Degarmo & Forgatch, 2005), used smaller and unrepresentative samples (Sokol-Katz, Dunham, & Zimmerman, 1997), and used self-reports of delinquency (Kaufman, 2000), all with vary ing external validity limitations for the field.…”

Juvenile Delinquency and Family Environment in Jordan

“…Studies on family structure and age interaction with delinquency have shown that family structure effect the attachment between the child and his parents and relationship with deviant peers and also shown that the important of these factors change according to the age where it bad influence on the delinquents come more when it occurs is an early childhood (Kierkus&Bear, 2002;Rebellon, 2002). …”