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Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Youth and Adolescence 5/2007

01-07-2007 | Original Paper

Compounded Risk: The Implications for Delinquency of Coming from a Poor Family that Lives in a Poor Community

Auteurs: Carter Hay, Edward N. Fortson, Dusten R. Hollist, Irshad Altheimer, Lonnie M. Schaible

Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Youth and Adolescence | Uitgave 5/2007

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Abstract

The relationship between poverty and juvenile involvement in delinquency remains central to the study of adolescent development, but firm conclusions on this relationship have been elusive. The purpose of this study is to address an important limitation of prior research that often has been overlooked. This involves the standard practice of examining the poverty-delinquency relationship with an exclusive focus on the family's level of poverty. This study considers that the effects of family poverty on delinquency may significantly depend upon the level of poverty in the community in which the family lives. Specifically, drawing from a number of poverty-oriented theories of delinquency, we examine the hypothesis that community poverty amplifies the effects of family poverty, such that family poverty's effect becomes greater when community poverty also is high. Using data from a national sample of adolescents that are supplemented with U.S. census data, we find partial support for the idea that family poverty is consequential for delinquency, and that this is especially true for poor families that also live in poor communities.
Voetnoten
1
Zip-code level extracts from the 1980 census were available through the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research (Adams, 1991a) and their analysis was facilitated by the documentation provided by Adams (1991b).
 
2
Police contacts are included in the scale because of research by Dunford and Elliott (1984) and William and Gold (1972) indicating that they can provide a proxy for frequent involvement in a range of serious offenses, some of which were not inquired about in the NSC interviews.
 
3
Standardizing the delinquency variable eases the interpretation of results by allowing the poverty variables to be more clearly described in terms of their standard deviation impacts on delinquency. For the overall family poverty measure (which combines income, education, unemployment, and welfare support, and therefore has no meaningful metric), this will be done by discussing the standardized coefficients. For the disaggregated variables (which have response categories that have a meaningful metric), the focus will be on the unstandardized coefficients. With the delinquency measure standardized, the unstandardized coefficients indicate the standard deviation unit change in delinquency that comes from a one-unit change in that variable (e.g., from employed to unemployed).
 
4
As a blind reviewer helpfully pointed out, this nearly significant effect of welfare support could reflect an effect of unemployment, given that unemployment clearly has the strongest effect on delinquency and unemployment compensation is one of the forms of government assistance included in the measure of welfare support.
 
5
The infrequency of unemployment explains why its important effect does not translate into large increases in R-squared. R-squared is very sensitive to how much variability is found in the variables. Predictors with minimal variability are constrained in their ability to explain large portions of variation in an outcome, especially to the extent that the outcome itself is more highly variable (see Pedhazur, 1982).
 
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Metagegevens
Titel
Compounded Risk: The Implications for Delinquency of Coming from a Poor Family that Lives in a Poor Community
Auteurs
Carter Hay
Edward N. Fortson
Dusten R. Hollist
Irshad Altheimer
Lonnie M. Schaible
Publicatiedatum
01-07-2007
Gepubliceerd in
Journal of Youth and Adolescence / Uitgave 5/2007
Print ISSN: 0047-2891
Elektronisch ISSN: 1573-6601
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-007-9175-5

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