Original articlesPerceived parental monitoring and health risk behaviors among urban low-income African-American children and adolescents
Section snippets
Participants
The data were collected from subjects involved in three community-based risk-reduction studies conducted among urban, low-income, African-American children and adolescents. Recruitment procedures for these studies have been described in detail elsewhere 12, 13. The first study sample consisted of 455 youth 9–15 years of age (217 males) who participated in a cross-sectional survey conducted in 1992 12, 14. The second study sample consisted of 355 youth 9–17 years of age (173 males) who
Differences in perceived parental monitoring according to individual characteristics
As shown in Table 1, there were significant gender and age differences in perceived level of parental monitoring at the item level. In general, female adolescents perceived a higher level of parental monitoring than did males. This gender-related difference was statistically significant for all of the items in the Parental Monitoring Scale in both the 1992 and 1994 surveys and for five of the six items in the 1996 survey. In general, older youth (e.g., those aged at least 12 years) were less
Discussion
The findings in the current study confirm the strong inverse association between PPM and adolescent risk behavior found in previous studies. Low levels of PPM were associated with participation in a wide variety of health risk behaviors, including sexual behavior, smoking cigarettes, consumption of alcoholic beverages, drug trafficking, and violent behaviors. Monitoring is one of the protective factors within the perceived environment domain of Jessor’s conceptual framework of adolescent risk
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Grants R01 MH54983 and U10 MH45689 from the National Institutes of Health and U01 HS07392 from the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. The authors thank other members of the research teams and all of the participating community agencies and youth. They thank Yvonne Summers for her aid in preparing the manuscript.
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