Families and the legal socialization process: the impact of symbiotic harms

ABSTRACT

Past research has offered an important starting point for understanding the legal socialization process, known as one’s ever changing orientation about the legal system. However, little is known about the extent to which family members influence adolescents’ legal socialization. Using the year 15 (wave 6) survey data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study dataset (N = 2,749), the current paper explores the association between parental and sibling police contact and legal cynicism as one dimension in the legal socialization process. This study examines how the family experience of a police stop may be an overlooked mechanism in the transmission of perceptions about the law. Results suggest that teens’ own experiences are important, and sibling police contact strengthens this effect, warranting further exploration of family in legal socialization research. We highlight the potential role of police contact as a symbiotic harm – one that flows between familial relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Legal socialization
• delinquency
• families
• siblings

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.2024.2379403

Notes

1. The FFCWB Wave 6 data was released in 2019.

2. Year 15 or wave 6 is currently the final wave of data.

3. MICE utilizes iterative procedures to impute missing values when more than one variable is missing and when those variables are of different types – complete results of Little’s MCAR test are provided in online Appendix B (Allison, 2000).

4. PCG is used for demographic control measures. Before administering the year 9 survey, interviewers determined which parent was the primary caregiver for the focal child. This determined who the PCG survey is administered to and included either the child’s biological mother, father, or a non-parental caregiver.

5. “Multi-racial was reported when participants described themselves as ‘mixed,’ ‘multi-racial,’ or ‘bi-racial.’

6. One of these key assumptions is that there is little multicollinearity among the independent variables, where no variable is a perfect function of other explanatory variables. To test this assumption, we ran a variance inflation factor test (VIF) for Model 5. The mean VIF score was 1.45. Some scholars suggest that a VIF score of more than 4 indicates multicollinearity (Sirigari 2020). No VIF scores were above 2, therefore, we left all of the predictors in the model (see online Appendix B).

7. Perfect correlation happens if two independent variables have a Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 1. To test that this assumption was not violated, we performed a correlation matrix of all independent variables (See online Appendix B).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauren A. Morgan

Lauren A. Morgan recently received her doctorate from the University of Missouri - St. Louis (UMSL) in criminology and criminal justice. Her research interests include the intersection of juvenile justice and foster care systems, child welfare and juvenile justice policy, organizations and criminal justice, and crossover youth. Her dissertation examines the organizational properties of the juvenile justice and foster care systems in the Midwest and their impacts on crossover youth.

Andrea Giuffre

Andrea Giuffre is an assistant professor in the department of criminal justice at California State University San Bernardino. Andrea received her doctorate from the University of Missouri - St. Louis (UMSL) in Criminology & Criminal Justice. Prior to arriving at UMSL, she obtained her Master of Arts in Criminal Justice with a specialization in Victimology from Seattle University. Giuffre also holds Bachelor’s degrees in Law, Societies & Justice and Philosophy from the University of Washington. Her primary research interests include the social harms of criminal legal system contact, financial operations of the criminal legal system, and corrections.