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The Importance of Family and School Domains in Adolescent Deviance: African American and Caucasian Youth

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Abstract

Previous work has documented the similar importance of developmental domains in accounting for adolescent deviance in different racial/ethnic groups (e.g., Vazsonyi A. T., and Flannery, D. J., 1997, J. Early Adolesc. 17(3): 271–293). The current investigation is a replication and extension of this line of work. It examined the importance of the family (closeness, monitoring, and conflict) and school (grades, homework time, educational aspirations, and commitment) domains on a sample of adolescent (mean age = 16.4 years) African American and Caucasian youth (N = 809). The following important findings were made: (a) developmental processes including family and school domain variables and deviance were very similar for African American and Caucasian youth; (b) both developmental domains revealed independent predictive relationships with a number of different measures of adolescent deviance in both groups; and (c) the 2 domains uniquely accounted for 25% and 37% of the variance explained respectively in African American and Caucasian adolescent total deviance.

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Vazsonyi, A.T., Pickering, L.E. The Importance of Family and School Domains in Adolescent Deviance: African American and Caucasian Youth. Journal of Youth and Adolescence 32, 115–128 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021857801554

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