The Rochester Youth Development Study, funded primarily by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, is a longitudinal study of the causes and correlates of delinquency. Using a sample of 1,000 youth that over-represents individuals at high risk for serious delinquent careers, the design of the project calls for interviews of the child and one of his or her parents at six-month intervals over a three-and-a-half year period. The purpose of the research is to examine the factors associated with initiation, maintenance, and cessation of delinquent behavior and drug use. Pro-social behaviors are also identified that potentially buffer youth from delinquent careers. The overall conceptual framework for the study is based on an interactional theory of delinquency that focuses on the structural organization of family and peer networks. Data are organized around six general concepts: attachment to parents, commitment to school, belief in conventional values, associations with delinquent peers, adopting delinquent values, and engaging in delinquent behavior. This grant will support wave three of the parent interviews in the Rochester study. Due to reductions in support from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the study budget was reduced by 27 percent, which necessitated eliminating wave three of the parent interviews. The absence of this wave of parental interviews would substantially weaken the scientific value of the overall research effort and the panel design especially since the end of 8th or 9th grade is an important transition point in parent-child relationships that may be associated with later delinquency. The NSF contribution will reinstate the parent interviews to the data collection. The use of parental interviews is unusual in delinquency research and permits a direct examination of interactional and socialization effects. The interviews with parents will enable the investigators to examine such issues as whether and when attachment to parents operates to inhibit antisocial behavior as well as whether antisocial behavior affects attachment uniformly across different parenting types. Not only will the study provide a rich and unique data set available to others for secondary analysis but it will contribute significantly to scientific knowledge and enlightened public policy about delinquency and its causes.
