The ties that bind: mediating the connection between perceived parental support/monitoring and perceived peer delinquency with two forms of antisocial cognition

ABSTRACT

Prior research has shown that social variables are linked to delinquent and criminal outcomes by facets of antisocial cognition. The current study set out to determine if a person’s perception of different social variables, in this case parental support/monitoring and peer delinquency, are likewise linked by some of these same variables, cognitive insensitivity specifically. Analyses performed across three time periods measured one year apart using data from the Pocono Bullying Study (N = 845, 406 boys and 439 girls, mean age at baseline = 11.2 years) revealed that one of the two pathways (parental monitoring → cognitive insensitivity → peer delinquency) predicted to be significant, was, in fact, significant. Conversely, the two pathways predicted to be non-significant (i.e. the ones mediated by cognitive impulsivity) were non-significant, although the difference between the one significant insensitivity-mediated pathway and its corresponding impulsivity-mediated pathway failed to achieve significance. The results of this study provide partial support for the notion that facets of antisocial thinking may not only mediate relationships between social context variables and delinquent outcomes, but relationships between certain groups of perceived social context variables as well.

KEYWORDS:

• Parental monitoring
• parental support
• cognitive insensitivity
• peer delinquency

Acknowledgments

Research for this study was supported by grants from the Kutztown University Foundation and Kutztown University Research Committee to Glenn Walters (PI). The authors would like to thank the staff and students at J. T. Lambert Middle School in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, without whom this study would not have been possible. The authors report no conflicts of interest with respect to this study.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Kutztown University Research Committee Kutztown University Foundation.