Examining the Effects of Family and School Social Capital on Delinquent Behavior

Abstract

In this article we evaluate and compare the effects of social capital at home and social capital at school on the frequency of involvement in delinquent behavior in the previous year. Using data from the first wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health, 1994–95; N = 8,100), a nationally representative survey of youth in the United States, we find that social sources of capital in the family exert a stronger negative influence on delinquency than school-based sources of capital, net the effects of other common correlates of this type of adolescent behavior.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. We thank the Deviant Behavior reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

¹ One weakness that results from including the peer delinquency network measures is sample attrition (see McKune and Hoffmann 2009). To address this issue, we ran the same models replacing the peer delinquency measures with respondents’ reports of their friends’ drug use, which allowed for use of a substantially larger Add Health subsample (n = 13,569). The patterns of results across all of these models were very similar; therefore, we choose to present the models that include the peer network delinquency measures. Results for the models including respondents’ reports of peer drug use as a proxy for peer delinquency are available from the authors upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mikaela J. Dufur

MIKAELA J. DUFUR is Associate Professor of sociology at Brigham Young University. Her work on child and adolescent social capital has been published in Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Journal of Health and Social Behavior. She also studies the effects of single-mother and single-father households on child outcomes.

John P. Hoffmann

JOHN P. HOFFMANN is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Brigham Young University. He received a Ph.D. from SUNY–Albany and an MPH from Emory University. His research interests include the etiology of delinquency and drug use.

David B. Braudt

DAVID B. BRAUDT recently completed an M.S. degree in Sociology at Brigham Young University. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at UNC–Chapel Hill.

Toby L. Parcel

TOBY L. PARCEL is Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University. She researches the effects of capital at home and at school on child and adolescent academic and social behaviors. With Andrew Taylor, she is co-author of The End of Consensus: Diversity, Neighborhoods, and the Politics of Public School Assignments (2015) from the University of North Carolina Press.

Karen R. Spence

KAREN R. SPENCE obtained an M.S. degree in Sociology from Brigham Young University. Her primary research interests are juvenile delinquency, deviance, and social control. She recently finished working on a project related to social capital and violent adolescent behavior.