NCJ Number
80153
Journal
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology Volume: 49 Issue: 6 Dated: (December 1981) Pages: 959-967
Date Published
1981
Length
9 pages
Annotation
Delinquent behavior in adolescent girls may be related to deficits in social skills; that is, some girls may behave maladaptively because they lack the skills to perform more competently.
Abstract
During the first phase of this research, the Problem Inventory for Adolescent Girls (PIAG) was developed to measure competence in social situations. The second phase of the research compared the performance of carefully matched groups of delinquent and nondelinquent girls on the inventory. The PIAG significantly discriminated between the groups; 40 of the 52 individual items also discriminated between the delinquent and nondelinquent girls. Ten of the 12 nondiscriminating items were those for which the criteria had been developed by teenagers. This suggests that delinquency is more closely related to skill deficits in interacting with adult authority figures than to skill deficits with peers. Items on the inventory generally were independent of one another and lacked an interpretable clustering pattern. A discriminant analysis yielded a function that resulted in 85% of the subjects being correctly assigned to their appropriate delinquent or nondelinquent group on the basis of their performance on the inventory. (Publisher abstract)