Early pubertal timing places girls at elevated risk for a breadth of negative outcomes, including involvement in delinquent behavior. While previous developmental research has emphasized the unique social challenges faced by early maturing girls, this relation is complicated by genetic influences for both delinquent behavior and pubertal timing, which are seldom controlled for in existing resea...

The present study examined physical dating aggression in different adolescent relationships and assessed linear, threshold, and moderator risk models for recurrent aggressive relationships. The 621 participants (59% girls, 41% boys) were drawn from a 1-year longitudinal survey of Canadian high school youths ranging from Grade 9 through Grade 12. Approximately 13% of participants reported recurr...

The current study prospectively examined hypothesized short- and long-term reciprocal relations between perceived parental knowledge and adolescent heavy episodic drinking, marijuana use, and delinquency. Using the contextual model of parenting style (Darling & Steinberg, 1993), we examined the extent to which the bidirectional nature of associations between knowledge and adolescent outcomes is...

A number of studies have found a negative relationship between IQ and delinquent involvement. Some researchers maintain that IQ is a spurious variable in the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and delinquency, whereas others assert that IQ bears a causal relationship to delinquency that is independent of the effects of SES. Results from two Danish prospective longitudinal studies a...

The aim of this study was to examine whether street gang membership, psychological factors, and social factors such as preprison experiences could predict young offenders' involvement in prison gang activity. Data were collected via individual interviews with 188 young offenders held in a Young Offenders Institution in the United Kingdom. Results showed that psychological factors such as the va...