NCJ Number
224491
Journal
Criminal Justice and Behavior Volume: 35 Issue: 11 Dated: November 2008 Pages: 1411-1428
Date Published
November 2008
Length
18 pages
Annotation
Five waves of longitudinal data collected from 348 African-Americans living in extreme poverty were analyzed to determine the impact of the youths’ exposure to violence on the level and quality of parental monitoring of the youth.
Abstract
The study found that the youths’ level of exposure to violence at T1 was a precursor of a trajectory of declining parental monitoring from T1 to T5. Youth characterized by a stable and sharply increasing exposure to violence were just over 200 percent more likely to experience declining parental monitoring from T1 to T5. These multivariate findings provide clear evidence of interactions between youths’ exposure to violence in their communities and parenting practices. Chronic exposure to violence is linked to the declining effectiveness of parental monitoring of youth over time. Thus, this study provides strong support for the ecological-transactional model of community violence, which predicts that there will be dynamic and mutually reinforcing exchange between the exosystem (exposure to violence) and microsystem (parenting) over time. The study used 5 waves of longitudinal self-report data collected annually from 360 youth between 1998 and 2002 as part of a large, ongoing community-based study of adolescent risk behavior called the Mobile Youth Survey (MYS). Youth ages 9-19 living in 12 high-poverty neighborhoods in Mobile, AL were targeted for this multiple cohort study. The survey was administered annually in the home. Parents were not allowed to be present during the interviews. The survey measured youths’ views of their parents’ monitoring of their behaviors and the youths’ frequency of exposure to violence. 3 figures, 3 tables, and 45 references