DOI: 10.3886/e240312v1
title: Parental Knowledge, Monitoring, and Perceptions of Juvenile Sex Offender Laws

description: Data collection occurred using an online self-report, confidential survey. The sample consists of 139 parents, defined as adult guardians, who report at least one child under the age of 18. We recruited parents from three groups: those whose child (1) had not yet had contact with the criminal justice system, (2) had contact with the system for an alleged sex offense, and (3) had contact with the system for an alleged non-sex offense.<br><br><br>
description: Response Rates: The survey collected data from 157 Virginia parents. Five cases were dropped because of low-quality data (e.g., failing more than one attention check in the survey) or because of rare responses (e.g., parental role = other or child gender = non-binary). After excluding those with any missing data and one person who did not want their data shared, the analytic sample includes 138 parents.<br>
description: Presence of Common Scales: <b>Parents’ knowledge of Virginia juvenile sex offender registration laws</b>. The survey asked parents about whether they thought each of four different registrable sex offenses could result in juveniles being placed on the sex offender registry in Virginia, along with whether they thought a juvenile could ever be placed on the registry in Virginia.[1] The distribution was right-skewed, with a high level of overall knowledge in the sample, so we categorized the number of correct answers into low (0-2), middle (3-4), and high (5) levels of knowledge to examine low knowledge (reference) compared to middle or high levels of knowledge. [1] The five questions were: (1) In Virginia, can someone under the age of 18 ever be placed on the sex offender registry? (2) In Virginia, can people under the age of 18 be placed on the sex offender registry for touching other minors on the buttocks, genitals, or breasts without their permission? (3) In Virginia, can people under the age of 18 be placed on the sex offender registry for sending naked pictures of themselves to other minors with their permission? (4) In Virginia, can people under the age of 18 be placed on the sex offender registry for mooning or flashing (exposing genitals or breasts to) other minors? (5) In Virginia, can people under the age of 18 be placed on the sex offender registry for asking other minors to perform sexual acts with them? <br><br><b>Parents’ confidence in their knowledge of JSO laws</b>. After each of the five knowledge questions on the survey, parents reported their confidence in their answer (1=not confident at all to 5=completely confident).<br><br><b>Child system involvement category.</b> The categories are no system contact (reference), system contact for an alleged sex offense, and system contact for an alleged non-sex offense.<br><br><b>Most recent offense. </b>Qualitative data on offense type<br><br><b>Location of offense. </b>From categories of: school, home, neighborhood, friend or other peer's house/neighborhood, Other <br><br><b>Who reported the offense. </b>Categories are: Teacher, School administrator, The victim's parent, The victim, Other<br><br><b>Action of the court. </b>Qualitative data on parental report of the court's response to the offense<br><br><b>Child's first contact with the court. </b>Yes or no response. If no, number of prior contacts is asked. <br><br><b>Child suspected or diagnosed mental health condition. </b>Categories are yes, no, prefer not to answer<br><b><br>Child IEP. </b>Categories are yes, no, prefer not to answer<br><b><br>Child gender identity</b> is a dichotomous measure of male (reference) and female. <br><br><b>Child age</b> is a continuous measure of the child’s age at the time of the survey in years.<br><br><b>Child age at most recent offense </b>is a continuous measure of the child’s age at the time of the most recent offense in years<b>. </b><br><br><b>Parental role</b> is a dichotomous measure of father (reference) and mother. <br><br><b>Parental monitoring</b> is the average of 4 items of parent’s current monitoring practices: knowing how your child spends their free time, knowing how they spend their money, how often they spend time with peers without an adult present, and how often they spend time with a romantic partner without an adult present. Each item ranged from 1= never to 5=always (reverse coded where necessary so that higher values indicate higher levels of monitoring). <br><br><b>Parents’ social media awareness</b> is the total number of social media sites with which the parent reported being moderately or very familiar, from 0 to 7 sites. The survey asked about parents’ familiarity with seven sites: TikTok, Discord, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, and Omegle. Each item originally ranged from ranged from 0=not at all familiar to 3=very familiar. <br><br><b>Parent race and ethnicity.</b> Our sample included a range of racial and ethnic categories. Because some of these categories had few respondents, parent’s race is also included as a dichotomous variable of White (reference) and non-White in the analyses. <br><br><b>Parent education.</b> A categorical measure of whether parents reported less than a 4-year college degree, a 4-year college degree, or some graduate school or more. <br><br><b>Victimization</b> is a dichotomous variable for whether the parent has experienced a crime. <br><br><b>Parent’s political identity.</b> A categorical variable including conservative, moderate, and liberal. <br><br><b>Parent age. </b>A continuous measure of parent’s age in years.<br><br><b>Parental marital status. </b>Categories are: Married, living with spouse; Married, separated from spouse; Single, never married; Divorced or permanently separated from a spouse or widowed<br><br><b>Parental occupation. </b>Employment status (full-time, part-time, retired, not working or employed) as well as a qualitative measure of occupation. <br><br><b>Frequency of contact. </b>A measure to assess how frequently parents see their child. If their child was locked up, then they are requested to answer
based on how frequently you saw them before they were locked up. Categories are daily, weekly, monthly, less than monthly<br><br><b>Hours online</b>. A continuous measure of the total number of hours their child spend online. Also recorded the percentage of those hours that are supervised by an adult. <br><br><b>Parental controls on accounts. </b>Yes/no have them on devices and also record if they have access to the social media accounts. <br><br><b>J-ATSO - </b>Juvenile version of the attitudes towards sex offenders<br><br><b>J-Registry</b> - Juvenile version of attitudes towards sex offender registries
description: Data collection occurred using an online self-report, confidential survey. The sample consists of 138 parents, defined as adult guardians, who report at least one child under the age of 18. We recruited parents from three groups: those whose child (1) had not yet had contact with the criminal justice system, (2) had contact with the system for an alleged sex offense, and (3) had contact with the system for an alleged non-sex offense.<br><br>Recruitment first occurred through Prolific, which is an online platform where users can sign up for to take surveys. Prolific allows researchers to set criteria for survey participation. To qualify to take the survey, respondents had to be adults living in Virginia who were parents of at least one child. For parents with a child who had criminal justice system contact for committing an alleged offense, the child had to be under the age of 18. For the group of parents whose children had not yet had system contact, the child had to be between the ages of 10 and 17. Since these are the ages at which most juveniles commit crimes (e.g., Sweeten, Piquero, & Steinberg, 2013), this age range was selected to have parents with children at similar ages across the groups. Prolific yielded enough parents whose child had not yet had system contact, but very few parents whose child had system contact. To supplement the Prolific data, we posted a flyer to a local Virginia Reddit page where interested participants could email for a survey to see whether they qualified. The posting gained traction, and we were able to get enough participants whose child had system contact.