Resilient youth: identifying factors that prevent high-risk youth from engaging in delinquency and drug use

VioLit summary: OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study by Smith et al. was to identify factors that would protect high-risk youth from delinquency and drug use. METHODOLOGY: The authors employed a quasi-experimental survey design in this study. The authors drew their sample from the Rochester Youth Development Study (RYDS). This study interviewed adolescents and their primary caretakers every six moths beginning in the spring of 1988 for four and a half years. The study was designed to oversample youth at a high risk for delinquency and drug use. Two stratification factors were used in sample identification. First, males were oversampled. Second, individuals from high crime areas were oversampled. Because the probability of being selected into the sample was known by the researchers, the data was weighted to represent all students in Rochester public schools. Relatively few students and/or their caretakers dropped out. Hence, sample retention in the RYDS was good. As a result, attrition biases were minimal. The number of respondents used in the current analysis was 772. The authors were interested in five questions. 1) Can youth at high-risk for delinquency and drug use be identified by cumulative family-related dysfunction in childhood? 2) What proportions of these high-risk youth are resilient to delinquency and drug use? 3) What protective factors distinguish between high-risk youth who do engage in delinquency and drug use and high-risk youth that do not? 4) Are the effects of protective factors cumulative? 5) Do protective factors act differently in the short term versus the long term? The authors operationalized risk factors, protective factors, and delinquency and drug use. Nine family circumstances and dysfunction variables were used as risk factors. These included such items as parents who did not finish high school, head of the household unemployed, receiving welfare, parents with drug problems, and child abuse and maltreatment. Individuals whose family exhibited five or more of these items were identified as high-risk youth. A number of different protective factors relating to the individual (such as self esteem and involvement in prosocial activities), family (such as parental supervision and parental attachment), school (such as commitment to learning and attachment to teachers), and peer group (such as association with prosocial peers) were considered. Delinquency was measured by self reports of the commission of 44 different acts committed in the past six months. The individuals items were adopted from the delinquency measures used in the National Youth Survey. Only serious and moderately serious delinquent acts were considered. Resilient youth were defined as individuals with no involvement in serious or moderately serious delinquent acts. Drug use was measured by self reports of the use of substances such as heroin and crack. Marijuana use was not considered. Those individuals who reported no use of heroin and crack in the past six months were identified as resilient. The authors used simple descriptive techniques to analyze the data. FINDINGS/DISCUSSION: First, the authors found that family functioning factors acted cumulatively to identify high-risk youth. The cumulative risk factors were positively and significantly associated with both later delinquency and drug use. Second, the authors reported that nearly 60% of these high risk individuals were resilient to delinquency and drug use. Next, the authors examined whether the level of protective factors could distinguish between resilient and non-resilient youth. With regards to delinquency the authors found that parental supervision, child's attachment to parent, parent's attachment to child, reading and mathematics scores, commitment to school, attachment to teachers, aspirations to go to college, expectations to go to college, prosocial peers, parent's positive evaluation of peers, and the child's self esteem significantly distinguished between resilient and non-resilient youth. Results showed that only parental involvement, parent's values for their child going to college, the child's involvement in religion, the child's involvement in prosocial activities, and the child's close ties to an adult outside of the family did not significantly distinguish between resilient and non-resilient youth. With regard to drug use, all protective factors except parental involvement, parent's values about college, parental expectations about child going to college, self esteem, involvement in religion, the child's involvement in prosocial activities, and the child's close ties to an adult outside the family significantly distinguished between resilient and non-resilient youth. Lastly, the findings indicated that protective factors act cumulatively on resiliency. Moreover, the authors reported that individuals with more operative protective factors were significantly more likely to be resilient to delinquency and drug use in the short term only. Results showed that protective factors had little to no effect on resilience to delinquency in the long term. However, the authors reported that early protective factors continued to exert a significant impact on resilience for drug use in the long term. AUTHORS' RECOMMENDATIONS: The authors made several recommendations. First, they argued that intervention programs designed to combat delinquency on a number of different fronts were more likely to be successful given their findings. They especially recognized the importance of school-based programs. Second, the authors argued that more research and theorizing was needed on the developmental perspective of delinquency and drug use. Overall, they suggested that future research recognize and pursue the developmental character of delinquency and drug use across the life course. EVALUATION: The area of resilience in criminology is one of the few new groundbreaking loci of research in recent years. And this study makes a worthy contribution to this literature. While the identification of protective factors resembles a laundry list, the authors' choices are always theoretically and empirically informed. The study is methodologically sound. In all, this study will make a significant contribution to future developmental work on delinquency and drug use. (CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado) New York Delinquency Protective Factors Delinquency Risk Factors Substance Use Risk Factors Substance Use Protective Factors Drug Use Protective Factors Drug Use Risk Factors Drug Use Prevention Substance Use Prevention Delinquency Prevention At Risk Youth At Risk Juvenile Resiliency Juvenile Offender Drug Use Causes Delinquency Causes 03-05