Monitoring and delinquency

This study examined the effects of parental monitoring in order to discover specific ways that their relationships with their parents affect adolescents’ delinquent behaviour. Data were taken from the National Survey of Youth 1972, a survey of a representative sample of 1395 Americans in the age range 11‐18 years. Conditions such as the age and sex of the respondents, their affectional relationships with their parents, the composition of their families and their estimates of the delinquency of their friends all qualified the relationship between parental monitoring and their self‐reported delinquency. In one condition, the generally negative relationship was reversed.