The Sibling Effect for Delinquency: Mediation by Proactive Criminal Thinking and Moderation by Age

Abstract

This study tested whether the sibling delinquency effect, like the peer influence effect, is mediated by proactive (planned, calculated, and amoral) criminal thinking. Youth who completed the Offending, Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS) and had a sibling living at home were divided into an early adolescent subsample (n = 795) and a mid-adolescent subsample (n = 532) after it was determined that age moderated the effect of sibling delinquency on proactive criminal thinking and serious offending. The results of a causal mediation analysis revealed a significant pathway running from sibling delinquency at Wave 1, to proactive criminal thinking at Wave 2, to serious offending at Wave 3, but only in the early adolescent subsample. These results suggest that the sibling delinquency effect may be the result of learning proactive criminal thinking in association with a delinquent sibling while still an early adolescent.

Keywords

sibling delinquency proactive criminal thinking causal mediation analysis

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ackerman

R. A.

Donnellan

M. B.

(2013). Evaluating self-report measures of narcissistic entitlement. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 35, 460-474.

Akers

R. L.

(1998). Social learning and social structure: A general theory of crime and deviance. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.

Allison

P. D.

(2012). Handling missing data by maximum likelihood (SAS Global Forum 2012, Paper 312-2012). Cary, NC: SAS Institute.

Arnold

Levine

Patterson

G. R.

(1975). Changes in sibling behavior following family intervention. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43, 683-688.

Bachman

Schutt

R. K.

(2017). The practice of research in criminology and criminal justice (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Bandura

(1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Bandura

Barbaranelli

Caprara

G. V.

Pastorelli

(1996). Mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 364-374.

Bank

Patterson

G. R.

Reid

J. B.

(1996). Negative sibling interaction patterns as predictors of later adjustment problems in adolescent and young adult males. In Brody

G. H.

(Ed.), Advances in applied developmental psychology: Sibling relationships (pp. 197-229). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Barnow

Lucht

Freyberger

H.-J.

(2005). Correlates of aggressive and delinquent conduct problems in adolescent. Aggressive Behavior, 31, 24-39.

10.

Botvin

G. J.

Griffin

K. W.

Nichols

T. D.

(2006). Preventing youth violence and delinquency through a universal school-based prevention approach. Prevention Science, 7, 403-408.

11.

Brestan

E. V.

Eyberg

S. M.

Boggs

S. R.

Algina

(1997). Parent–child interaction therapy: Parents’ perceptions of untreated siblings. Child and Family Behavior Therapy, 19, 13-28.

12.

Brotman

L. M.

Dawson-McClure

Gouley

K. K.

McGuire

Burraston

Bank

(2005). Older siblings benefit from a family-based preventive intervention for preschoolers at risk for conduct problem. Journal of Family Psychology, 19, 581-591.

13.

Cairns

R. B.

Cairns

D. B.

(1994). Lifelines and risks: Pathways of youth in our time. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

14.

Caravita

S. C. S.

Sijtsema

J. J.

Rambaran

A. J.

Gini

(2014). Peer influences on moral disengagement in late childhood and early adolescent. Journal of Youth and Adolescent, 43, 193-207.

15.

Chua

Y. T.

Holt

T. J.

(2016). A cross-national examination of the techniques of neutralization to account for hacking behaviors. Victims and Offenders, 11, 534-555.

16.

Cole

D. A.

Maxwell

S. E.

(2003). Testing mediational models with longitudinal data: Questions and tips in the use of structural equation modeling. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 112, 558-577.

17.

Collins

L. M.

Schafer

J. L.

Kam

C. M.

(2001). A comparison of inclusive and restrictive strategies in modern missing data procedures. Psychological Methods, 6, 330-351.

18.

Craine

J. L.

Tanaka

T. A.

Nishina

Conger

K. J.

(2009). Understanding adolescent delinquency: The role of older siblings’ delinquency and popularity with peers. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 55, 436-453.

19.

Criss

M. M.

Shaw

D. S.

(2005). Sibling relationships as contexts for delinquency training in low-income families. Journal of Family Psychology, 19, 592-600.

20.

Defoe

I. N.

Keijsers

Hawk

S. T.

Branje

Dubas

J. S.

. . .Meeus

(2013). Siblings versus parents and friends: Longitudinal linkages to adolescent externalizing problems. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 54, 881-889.

21.

De Goede

I. H. A.

Branje

S. J. T.

Meeus

W. H. J.

(2009). Developmental changes in adolescents’ perceptions of relationships with their parents. Journal of Youth and Adolescent, 38, 75-88.

22.

East

(2009). Adolescents’ relationships with siblings. In Lerner

R. M.

Steinberg

(Eds.), Handbook of adolescent psychology (pp. 43-73). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

23.

Elwert

Winship

(2014). Endogenous selection bias: The problem of conditioning on a collider variable. Annual Review of Sociology, 40, 31-53.

24.

Farrington

D. P.

(2000). Explaining and preventing crime: The globalization of knowledge—The American Society of Criminology 1999 Presidential Address. Criminology, 38, 1-24.

25.

Farrington

D. P.

Barnes

G. C.

Lambert

(1996). The concentration of offending in families. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 1, 47-63.

26.

Gifford-Smith

Dodge

K. A.

Dishion

T. J.

McCord

(2005). Peer influence in children and adolescents: Crossing the bridge from developmental to intervention science. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 33, 255-265.

27.

Gottfredson

M. R.

Hirschi

(1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

28.

Hamlyn

Maxwell

Hales

Tait

(2003). The 2003 Crime and Justice Survey (England and Wales) (Technical report). London, England: National Centre for Social Research/BMRB Social Research.

29.

Hayes

A. F.

(2013). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. New York, NY: Guilford.

30.

Haynie

D. L.

Osgood

D. W.

(2005). Reconsidering peers and delinquency: How do peers matter? Social Forces, 84, 1109-1130.

31.

Huijsmans

Eichelsheim

V. I.

Weerman

Branje

S. J. T.

Meeus

(2019). The role of siblings in adolescent delinquency next to parents, school, and peers: Do gender and age matter? Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology, 5, 220-242.

32.

Kendler

K. S.

Morris

N. A.

Lönn

S. L.

Sundquist

(2014). Environmental transmission of violent criminal behavior in siblings: A Swedish national study. Psychological Medicine, 44, 3181-3187.

33.

Kenny

D. A.

(2013). Mediation: Sensitivity analysis [Webinar]. Retrieved from http://davidakenny.net/webinars/Mediation/Sensitivity/Sensitivity.html

34.

Kenny

D. A.

Judd

C. M.

(2014). Power anomalies in testing mediation. Psychological Science, 25, 334-339.

35.

Kerr

Stattin

Burk

W. J.

(2010). A reinterpretation of parental monitoring in longitudinal perspective. Journal of Research on Adolescent, 20, 39-64.

36.

Kramer

Conger

K. J.

(2009). What we learn from our sisters and brothers: For better or for worse. In Kramer

Conger

K. J.

(Eds.), Siblings as agents of socialization (pp. 1-12). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

37.

Lauritsen

J. L.

(1993). Sibling resemblance in juvenile delinquency: Findings from the National Youth Survey. Criminology, 31, 387-409.

38.

MacKinnon

D. P.

Kisbu-Sakarya

Gottschall

A. C.

(2013). Developments in mediation analysis. In Little

T. D.

(Ed.), The Oxford handbook of quantitative methods (Vol. 2, pp. 338-360). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

39.

Meldrum

R. C.

Barnes

J. C.

(2017). Unstructured socializing with peers and delinquent behavior: A genetically informed analysis. Journal of Youth and Adolescent, 46, 1968-1981.

40.

Muthén

(1998-2007). Mplus user’s guide (5th ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Author.

41.

Peyre

Leplége

Coste

(2011). Missing data methods for dealing with missing items in quality of life questionnaires. A comparison by simulation of personal mean score, full information maximum likelihood, multiple imputation, and hot deck techniques applied to the SF-36 in the French 2003 decennial health survey. Quality of Life Research, 20,287-300.

42.

Pituch

K. A.

Stapleton

L. M.

(2008). The performance of methods to test upper-level mediation in the presence of nonnormal data. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 43, 237-267.

43.

Preacher

K. J.

(2015). Advances in mediation analysis: A survey and synthesis of new developments. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 825-852.

44.

Preacher

K. J.

Hayes

A. F.

(2008). Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models. Behavior Research Methods, 40, 879-891.

45.

Preacher

K. J.

Kelley

(2011). Effect size measures for mediation models: Quantitative strategies for communicating indirect effects. Psychological Methods, 16, 93-115.

46.

Preacher

K. J.

Selig

J. P.

(2012). Advantages of Monte Carlo confidence intervals for indirect effects. Communication Methods and Measures, 6, 77-98.

47.

Ribeaud

Eisner

(2015). The nature of the association between moral neutralization and aggression: A systematic test of causality in early adolescent. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 61, 68-84.

48.

Rodgers

J. L.

Buster

Rowe

D. C.

(2001). Genetic and environmental influences on delinquency: DF analysis of NLSY kinship data. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 17, 145-168.

49.

Rowe

D. C.

Farrington

D. P.

(1997). The familial transmission of criminal convictions. Criminology, 35, 177-201.

50.

Rowe

D. C.

Linver

M. R.

Rodgers

J. L.

(1996). Delinquency and IQ: Using siblings to find sources of variation. In Brody

G. H.

(Ed.), Sibling relationships: Their causes and consequences (pp. 147-172). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

51.

Rucker

D. D.

Preacher

K. J.

Tormala

Z. L.

Petty

R. E.

(2011). Mediation analysis in social psychology: Current practices and new recommendations. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5, 359-371.

52.

Samek

D. R.

Goodman

R. J.

Riley

McGue

Iacono

W. G.

(2018). The developmental unfolding of sibling influences on alcohol use over time. Journal of Youth and Adolescent, 47, 349-368.

53.

Shadish

W. R.

Cook

T. D.

Campbell

D. T.

(2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

54.

Slomkowski

Rende

Conger

K. J.

Simons

R. L.

Conger

R. D.

(2001). Sisters, brothers, and delinquency: Evaluating social influence during early and middle adolescent. Child Development, 72, 271-283.

55.

Steinberg

Monahan

K. C.

(2007). Age differences in resistance to peer influence. Developmental Psychology, 43, 1531-1543.

56.

Stormshak

E. A.

Comeau

C. A.

Shepard

S. A.

(2004). The relative contribution of sibling deviance and peer deviance in the prediction of substance use across middle childhood. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 32, 635-649.

57.

Sweeten

(2012). Scaling criminal offending. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 28, 533-557.

58.

Sykes

G. M.

Matza

(1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22, 664-670.

59.

VanderWeele

T. J.

(2015). Explanation in causal inference: Methods for mediation and interaction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

60.

Walters

G. D.

(2015). Proactive criminal thinking and the transmission of differential association: A cross-lagged multi-wave path analysis. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 42, 1128-1144.

61.

Walters

G. D.

(2016). Friends, cognition, and delinquency: Proactive and reactive criminal thinking as mediators of the peer influence and peer selection effects. Justice Quarterly, 33, 1055-1079.

62.

Walters

G. D.

(2018a). PM effect size estimation for mediation analysis: A cautionary note, alternate strategy, and real data illustration. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 21, 25-33.

63.

Walters

G. D.

(2018b). Sibling delinquency as a risk factor for future offending: An exploratory analysis. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 16, 343-357.

64.

Walters

G. D.

(2019a). Gang influence: Mediating the gang-delinquency relationship with proactive criminal thinking. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 46, 1044-1062.

65.

Walters

G. D.

(2019b). Why are mediation effects so small? International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 22, 219-232.

66.

Walters

G. D.

Yurvati

(2017). Testing the construct validity of the PICTS proactive and reactive scores against six putative measures of proactive and reactive criminal thinking. Psychology, Crime, and Law, 23, 1-14.

67.

Warr

(2002). Companions in crime: The social aspects of criminal conduct. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

68.

Wen

Fan

(2015). Monotonicity of effect sizes: Questioning kappa-squared as mediation effect size measure. Psychological Methods, 20, 193-203.

69.

Whiteman

S. D.

Jensen

A. C.

McHale

S. M.

(2017). Sibling influences on risky behaviors from adolescent to young adulthood: Vertical socialization or bidirectional effects? In Campione-Barr

(Ed.), New directions for child and adolescent development: Power, control, and influence in sibling relationships across development (Vol. 2017, pp. 67-85). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

70.

Wilkinson

Stitt

B. G.

Erickson

M. L.

(1982). Siblings and delinquent behavior. Criminology, 20, 223-239.

71.

Young

J. T. N.

Rebellon

C. J.

Barnes

J. C.

Weerman

F. M.

(2013). Unpacking the black box of peer similarity in deviance: Understanding the mechanisms linking personal behavior, peer behavior, and perceptions. Criminology, 52, 60-86.

72.

Young

Johnson

D. R.

(2013). Methods for handling missing secondary respondent data. Journal of Marriage and Family, 75, 221-234.