Abstract:
Beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of engaging in various antisocial acts,
referred to here as nonnative beliefs legitimizing antisocial behaviour (nblab), have been
shown to playa role in the emergence oflater antisocial behaviour. The current study
represented an attempt to understand whether parental monitoring and parent-child
attachment have differential relationships with these antisocial nonnative beliefs in
adolescents of different temperaments. The participants, 7135 adolescents in 25 high
schools (ages 10- 18 years, M = 15.7) completed a wide-ranging questionnaire as part of
the broad Youth Lifestyle Choices - Community University Research Alliance project,
whose goal is to identify and describe the major developmental pathways of risk
behaviours and resilience in youth. Two aspects of monitoring (monitoring knowledge
and surveillance/tracking), attachment security, and two measures of temperament
(activity level and approach) were examined for main effects and in interactions as
predictors of adolescent nonnative beliefs. All of these measures were based on
adolescent self-ratings on either 3- or 4-point Likert-type scales.
Several important results emerged from the study. Males were higher than
females in nblab; parental monitoring knowledge and adolescent attachment security
were negatively related to nblab; and temperamental activity level was positively related.
Monitoring knowledge, the strongest of the predictors, was much more strongly related to
nonnative beliefs than was parental surveillance/tracking, supporting the contention that
it is how much parents actually know, and not their surveillance efforts, that predict
adolescent nonnative beliefs. A surprising finding that is of the utmost importance was that, although several of the interactions tested were significant, none were considered to
be of a meaningful magnitude (defined as sr^ > .01).
The current study supported the suggestion that normative beliefs legitimizing
antisocial behaviour are multiply determined, and the results were discussed with respect
to the observed differential relations of parental monitoring, parent-child attachment,
temperament, age, and gender to antisocial normative beliefs in adolescents. Also
discussed were the need to test other parenting, temperament, and other variables that
may be involved in the development of nblab; the need to directly test possible
mechanisms explaining the links among the variables; and the usefulness of longitudinal
research in determining possible directions of causality and developmental changes in the
relationships.
