The moderating effects of religiosity on the relationship between stressful life events and delinquent behavior

Abstract

Previous research has shown that many forms of strain are positively related to delinquency. Evidence also suggests that religiosity buffers the effects of strain on offending, but this issue requires further research. Using data from a national sample of adolescents, this study examined whether or not religiosity conditioned the relationship between strain and delinquency. This study also looked at the ability of social support, self-esteem, and depression to moderate the influence of strain on delinquent behavior. The findings here lend support to general strain theory in that strain had a direct positive effect on delinquency, yet there was little evidence that the relationship was moderated by religiosity or other conditioning variables. The roles of moderating variables on strain across genders were also considered.

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“…Social support was measured using the same seven-item scale utilized in Johnson and Morris's (2008) and Kaufman's (2009) GST studies. These items from the Wave I interview assess how strongly the participant felt others in their life cared about them and were involved with their activities.…”

“…A self-esteem scale was created from seven questions assessing whether respondents felt they had lots of good qualities, were physically fit, had a lot to be proud of, liked themselves, did everything right, felt socially accepted, and felt loved (see Johnson & Morris, 2008). Each question had five ordinal response choices ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree and were coded so high scores indicated higher levels of self-esteem (α = .849).…”

“…These items assessed the importance of religion, participation in religious services, and participation in youth groups and were each recoded so higher scores indicate higher levels of religiosity. Those who skipped the questions due to answering a previous item as not being religious at all were given the score representing the least religious for each item as was done in previous GST studies (see Johnson & Morris, 2008). Though the concept of low self-control is central to another criminological theory (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990), Agnew (2006a) argues that low constraint, which is defined very similarly to low selfcontrol, is a conditioning variable within GST.…”

“…Mean-centered multiplicative interaction terms were calculated for each of the three types of strain with each of the six conditioning variables: anger, depression, social support, self-esteem, low constraint, and religiosity. As was done in prior GST studies (Johnson & Morris, 2008), these interaction terms were added individually to the complete model from the previous section (Model C). Following the lead of Johnson and Morris (2008), we present the coefficients of the interaction terms and their standard errors in Table 3 in order to focus the reader's attention on the interaction effects (or lack thereof).…”

“…As was done in prior GST studies (Johnson & Morris, 2008), these interaction terms were added individually to the complete model from the previous section (Model C). Following the lead of Johnson and Morris (2008), we present the coefficients of the interaction terms and their standard errors in Table 3 in order to focus the reader's attention on the interaction effects (or lack thereof). Each result represents the coefficient for the interaction term when it is included in a separate regression model with the variables in Model C.…”