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This longitudinal study of a community sample of inner-city boys
began in 1987. Funding
for the PYS has come from the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the National Institute of Mental
Health, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and the Pew
Charitable Trusts. The 1,517 boys in the study had been selected
from the first, fourth, and seventh grades of Pittsburgh public
schools (called the youngest, middle, and oldest sample,
respectively). After
an initial screening (85% of the randomly selected families
participated), 30% of the most antisocial boys (based on parent,
teacher and participant information) were included in the sample
for follow-up, along with 30% randomly selected from the
remainder. Just
over half of the sample is African American, and the remainder
Caucasian. Over 90%
lived with their natural mother (see Loeber, Farrington et al.,
1998 for details).
Project
goals:
1.
Document
the development of antisocial and delinquent behavior from
childhood to early adulthood, the risk factors that impinge on
that development, and help seeking and service provision of
boys’ behavior problems.
2. Focuses
on boys’ development of alcohol and drug use, and
internalizing problems.
Assessments were done initially half-yearly, and later yearly
and had the boys, their parents and teachers as informants.
A large variety of measures were used, with several
measures resulting from collaboration among investigators of the
OJJDP Program of Research on the Causes and Correlates of
Delinquency, consisting of the Denver Youth Survey (Principal
Investigator: David Huizinga), the Rochester Youth Development
Study (Principal Investigator: Terence P. Thornberry), and the
Pittsburgh Youth Study.
Key
Findings:
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The higher number of risk domains (i.e. in
the child, family, school, etc.), the higher the probability
of later serious delinquency; the lower the number of
promotive domains, the lower that probability. Risk
and promotive factors appear to cancel each other out in
determining long-term risk of serious delinquency
(Stouthamer-Loeber et al., 2002).
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Child-parent interactions tend to be stable,
such as physical punishment, communication, supervision,
positive parenting, and bad parent-child relationship
qualities. However, physical punishment decreased,
while poor supervision and low-level positive parenting
increased. In contrast, poor communication and a
disadvantaged relationship between the parent and child did
not materially change between ages 6 and 18 (Loeber,
Drinkwater et al., 2000).
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Almost 2% of the boys in the middle and
oldest samples were convicted of homicide (Loeber et al., in
preparation).
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In most cases, delinquent attitudes
predicted delinquency as well as the reverse. However,
attitudes predicted delinquency better with advancing age
(Zhang et al., 1997)
For more
information, please contact:
Academic: Rolf
Loeber Ph.D.
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