maternal characteristics, parenting, and adolescent sexual behavior: the role of self-control

Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime has been extensively tested by researchers in the field of criminology, and measures of self-control have been shown to predict crime, delinquency, and deviance. With few exceptions, however, the theory has not been applied to the study of adolescent sexual behavior. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the Children of the NLSY79, this research explores the direct and indirect effects of parenting and self-control on adolescent sexual behavior. Self-control predicts engagement in sexual activity, the number of sex partners, and relationship to last sex partner. Self-control also mediates the relationship between certain parental behaviors and adolescent sexual behavior. Keywords: Notes We would like to thank Karen Sheriff-Le Van and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. 1Michael Gottfredson (personal communication, 10/02) suggested that parental reports of adolescents' self-control should be reliable measures of self-control. He commented that if anything, this measurement strategy underestimates the extent of low self-control in our sample, thus attenuating the effects of self-control on adolescent sexual risk-taking. 2Parental reports of children's behavior have a history in criminology beginning with the Glueck and Glueck data in Citation1950 and continuing with Sampson and Laub's (Citation1993) re-assessment of the Glueck and Glueck data. Additionally, Whitbeck et al. (Citation1997) find that parental and adolescent assessments of home environment and parenting behavior for homeless and runaway youth (who have more strained parental relationships than most of the youth in our sample), although not identical, were similar and in the same direction. a N = 709 b N = 223 *p ≤ .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 3According to Arbuckle and Worthke (Citation1999), for good fitting models, the p-value should be non-significant, the RMSEA should be less than .05, NFI/CFI should be close to 1.00; and TLI (or the non-normed fit index for non-normal data) should be close to 1.0. 4Although very few of our independent variables directly predicted initiation to sexual activity, bivariate analyses did confirm that, consistent with prior research, older adolescents, non-whites, those who've lived in poverty, and those with weaker maternal attachment are significantly more likely to have had sex. We did not find, however, that gender was significantly related to initiation into sexual activity (32% of the boys versus 29% of the girls had ever had sex).