A Test of a Model with Reciprocal Effects Between Religiosity and Various Forms of Delinquency Using 2-Stage Least Squares Regression

This was a study of 1,093 adolescents from six different public high schools, where the same integrated theoretical model of control and social learning theories fit the data on alcohol use, heavy alcohol consumption, use of marijuana, criminal behavior, sexual exploration, and suicidal thoughts. It was observed that the model explained significantly more variance in some of these forms of delinquency than in others, indicating only equivocal support for the deviance syndrome argument in the literature. This study also found that religiosity was a significant influence only on criminal behavior, whereas the feedback eifect of delinquency on religiosity was significant for all forms of delinquent behavior studied. The importance of this particular finding was discussed in relation to previous studies, since almost all prior research has used statistics that do not consider reciprocal eifects. In the present study, the reciprocal effects between religiosity and various forms of delinquency were analyzed with two-stage least squares regression.