Predicting adolescent deviant behavior in Hong Kong: A comparison of media, family, school, and peer variables

Abstract

Predicting Adolescent Deviant Behavior in Hong Kong: A Comparison of Media, Family, School, and Peer Variables Juvenile and adolescent delinquent behavior has been a popular topic in both mass media effect research and criminological research. One of the limitations of these two types of research has been the lack of analyses using a combination of media variables and variables that are derived from delinquency theories pertaining to family, school, and peers in the explanation of adolescent deviant behavior. Based on a self-report study of a sample of 1,139 secondary school students in Hong Kong in 1986, this paper estimates the strengths of media variables (frequency of exposure, preference for violent/obscene content, imitation of media characters), family variables (attachment to parents, parents' negative labeling, parents' deviant behavior), school variables (attachment to school, teachers' negative labeling, academic performance), and peer variables (peers' deviant behavior, peers' negativelabeling, peers' disapproval of deviant behavior) in the prediction of adolescent deviant behavior. Results show that the equation containing frequency of media exposure, preference for violent/obscene content, imitation of media characters, parents' deviant behavior, teachers' negative labeling, peers' deviant behavior, and peers' disapproval of deviant behavior explained the greatest amount of variance of adolescent deviant behavior. Implications of these and other findings for future research are discussed.