Katherine Jewsbury Conger

Sisters, brothers, and delinquency: evaluating social influence during early and middle adolescence.

Although a number of studies have shown that brothers are highly correlated for delinquent behavior, much less research has been conducted on sisters. We propose that sisters, like brothers, show notable similarity for delinquent behavior, and also promote each others delinquency through direct interaction. We examined these issues in 164 brother and sister pairs studied over a 4-year period (from early to middle adolescence) in a study of intact families in the rural Midwest. Sibling similarity for self-reports of delinquent behavior were highly correlated for both brothers and sisters. Conditional effects of high levels of hostile-coercive sibling relationships and older sibling delinquency predicted younger sibling delinquency in both brother and sister pairs. For brothers, conditional effects were also detected for high levels of warmth-support, in contrast to sisters. The conditional effects of older sibling delinquency and relationship quality were shown to predict change in younger sibling delinquency through adolescence. The results add to a growing literature on sibling effects as well as theoretical models that emphasize the role of social interaction between siblings as a risk factor for the development of delinquent activity in adolescence.

Negotiating Adolescence in Times of Social Change: The Role of Economic Pressure in the Lives of Parents and Their Adolescents: The Family Stress Model

Social change in the form of economic restructuring and recessions has occurred across the United States throughout the countrys history. The Depression of the 1930s brought hardship to all regions of the country and produced a mass migration of farmers leaving the land. More recently, widespread unemployment resulting from worldwide competition in the Rust Belts steel industry, stagnation of U.S. car manufacturing in the face of foreign competition, the oil boom and bust in Texas, and the decline of the aerospace industry in the Northwest are all examples of macroeconomic change influencing the lives of thousands of families. Studies of unemployed autoworkers and their families, for example, revealed the staggering effects of unemployment: marriages fell apart, emotional and physical health problems increased, incidents of spouse and child abuse increased, and the demand for social services escalated (e.g., Kessler, Turner, & House, 1988; Perrucci & Targ, 1988). A similar period of economic decline struck agriculture in the 1980s and continues to plague rural areas of the country today. Riding the 1970s crest of unprecedented prosperity that included easy credit, escalating land values, and an increasing demand for grain, farmers of the Midwest mortgaged the family farm to modernize and expand, buying larger machinery and farming larger tracts of land. In many cases, plans were made to expand their operations to make room for their sons and daughters. These economic boom times also benefited the small towns that served farm families with increased retail sales, well-paying jobs related to agriculture, and an increased tax base that spurred local economic development such as newschools and community improvements.

Parenting Factors, Social Skills, and Value Commitments as Precursors to School Failure, Involvement with Deviant Peers, and Delinquent Behavior.

Elements of social control theory were combined with social learning theory to construct a model of delinquency which specifies the manner in which parenting factors, social skills, value commitments, and problems in school contribute to association with deviant peers and involvement in delinquent behavior. The model was tested using a sample of 61 families, each of which included a seventh grader. Questionnaire responses and coded videotaped family interaction were employed as measures of study constructs. The results largely supported the proposed model.

Pathways of economic influence on adolescent adjustment

An important part of a science aimed at the prevention of human dysfunction involves the development of empirically based models that identify processes of risk for or protection from emotional distress or behavioral problems over time. The present study developed and evaluated such a model that proposed two pathways through which family economic pressure was expected to influence change in adolescent internalizing symptoms (depression and anxiety) during the period from the eighth to the tenth grades. A total of 377 rural families in a midwestern state provided data for the analyses. The results were generally consistent with the conceptual model in that family economic pressure increased adolescent perceptions of family economic hardship, which, in turn, reduced the adolescents sense of control or mastery over time. Lowered mastery was associated with increases in emotional distress. Also consistent with the model, prior levels of mastery appeared to reduce the magnitude of economic stress experienced by the adolescent, whereas prior emotional distress intensified the economic stress process. Although gender differences were found in these processes, the overall pattern of results suggests that girls and boys are both at risk for internalizing problems when families experience economic pressure. Implicatios of the findings for the dvelopment of effective preventive interventions with financially stressed families in rural areas are discussed.