Assessing the Links Between Parenting Practices, Moral Emotions, and Cyberbullying Perpetrations Among a Sample of Iranian Sports Fans.

Parenting practices have direct effects on children's moral development and delinquency. A growing empirical literature also documents the influence of morality on offending patterns. Yet, our understanding of the interrelationships among parenting practices, morality, and cyberbullying is limited. This study contributes to and extends this line of research by examining the extent to which moral emotions mediate the relationship between parenting practices and sports fans' cyberbullying. We used a sample of 384 Iranian high school students from the 35th Boys Sports Olympiad Tournament in Shiraz, Iran. The results from structural modeling analysis show that both parenting practices and moral emotions are associated with the likelihood of sports fans' decision to perpetrate cyberbullying and that moral emotions mediate the association between parenting practices and cyberbullying. The robust and consistent patterns of the results signify the importance of parenting and moral development in curbing the problem of cyberbullying.

Early Puberty, School Context, and Delinquency Among South Korean Girls.

Compared with chronological age, criminologists have paid less attention to the biological sense of age typically expressed by pubertal development. Studies that have examined pubertal timing's effects on delinquency have almost exclusively been conducted in Western countries using mostly White samples. To our knowledge, no study has ever examined this issue in the Asian context. The current study is the first attempt to bridge this research gap by examining the association among menarcheal timing, the sex composition of schools, and delinquency in a representative sample of 1,108 ninth-grade girls in South Korea. The results show that significant association between early menarche and delinquency exists only in mixed-sex schools but not in all-girls schools. In addition, the significant linkage between early menarche and delinquency in mixed-sex schools is mediated by delinquent peer associations.

The Relationship Between Religiosity and Deviance Among Adolescents in a Religiously Pluralistic Society.

Most empirical studies of religion and deviance have employed samples from Western countries, especially the United States, where one predominant religion-Judeo-Christianity-is an embedded fixture of the mainstream culture. By comparison, research conducted in East Asia, where religious pluralism is the norm rather than the exception, is extremely scarce. Moreover, a large proportion of the population in East Asia professes themselves to be atheists. Given the drastically different religious climates between East and West, it thus remains an important empirical question whether the research findings on religiosity and deviance garnered from Western samples can be generalizable to East Asia. Given this background, the current study assesses the linkage between religiosity and deviance using a sample of adolescents in South Korea, where secular social controls emanating from Confucianism are potent. The results of the study show that religiosity's deviance-constraining effects are considerably weaker in South Korea. In addition, many of the Western findings do not apply to the South Korean context.

Neighborhood Disadvantage and Parenting: Behavioral Genetics Evidence of Child Effects.

The criminological literature has a long tradition of emphasizing the socialization effects that parents have on children. By contrast, evidence from behavioral genetics research gives precedence to child effects on parental management techniques over parental effects on children's outcomes. Considering these diverging lines of scholarship and literature, the current study explores a novel hypothesis that child effects on parenting may be conditioned by the level of the disadvantage of the neighborhood in which the child's family resides. By using measures of perceived parenting as dependent variables, the researchers analyze data on 733 same-sex sibling pairs derived from the Add Health study by taking advantage of the DeFries-Fulker analytical technique. The results show that in adequate neighborhoods, between 43% and 55% of the variance in the measures of perceived parenting is due to genetic factors, whereas shared environmental effects are negligible. In disadvantaged neighborhoods, genetic effects are negligible, whereas shared environmental influences account for between 34% and 57% of the variance in perceived parenting. These results offer partial support for the contextualized gene-environment correlation, which provides initial evidence that although both parental socialization effects and child effects exist, these effects can be modified by the context.

Low Self-Control Among South Korean Adolescents: A Test of Gottfredson and Hirschi's Generality Hypothesis.

Theoretical propositions and empirical tests of Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory continue to permeate the criminological literature. Nevertheless, the vast majority of studies have been conducted in North America and some European countries. Only a handful of empirical works have been conducted in East Asia. To further test the generality assertion of Gottfredson and Hirschi, the current study examines low self-control's efficacy in predicting the involvement of South Korean adolescents in typical delinquency, drinking, smoking, Internet addiction, and smartphone addiction. The presented findings largely support the generality hypothesis, although the theorists' assertion seems to be somewhat overstated.

Bullying Among South Korean Adolescents: Prevalence and Association With Psychological Adjustment.

This study assessed the prevalence rates of physical, verbal, relational, property, and cyber bullying among a sample of South Korean middle school students. Associations between bullying and a list of psychopathological symptoms were also examined. Finally, whether a link between bullying and psychopathological symptoms is modified by the level of parental attachment was examined. Results show that, contrary to Western studies, girls were more likely than boys to be involved in school bullying. Significant interaction effects between parental attachment and bully/victim status on depression were also discovered.

Disability and Violent Victimization in a National Sample of Adolescents: A Longitudinal Study.

In the victimization literature, a significant association has been consistently observed between disability and the victimization of children and adolescents. It is largely unknown, however, whether individuals with disabilities continue to suffer from a heightened risk of violent victimization when they reach young adulthood and adulthood. In addition, despite the close nexus between victimization and perpetration, prior studies have generally failed to control for violent acts perpetrated by individuals with disabilities. This study addresses these issues by drawing on the panel design nature of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The results show that although physical disability is not linked to victimization risk, learning disability is significantly associated with an elevated risk of violent victimization.

Dopaminergic Polymorphisms, Academic Achievement, and Violent Delinquency.

Recent research in the field of educational psychology points to the salience of self-control in accounting for the variance in students' report card grades. At the same time, a novel empirical study from molecular genetics drawing on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) data has revealed that polymorphisms in three dopaminergic genes (dopamine transporter [DAT1], dopamine D2 receptor [DRD2], and dopamine D4 receptor [DRD4]) are also linked to adolescents' grade point averages (GPAs). Juxtaposing these two lines of research, the current study reanalyzed the Add Health genetic subsample to assess the relative effects of these dopaminergic genes and self-control on GPAs. The results showed that the effects of the latter were far stronger than those of the former. The interaction effects between the dopaminergic genes and a set of environmental factors on academic performance were also examined, producing findings that are aligned with the "social push hypothesis" in behavioral genetics. Finally, based on the criminological literature on the link between academic performance and delinquency, we tested whether dopaminergic effects on violent delinquency were mediated by GPAs. The results demonstrated that academic performance fully mediated the linkage between these genes and violent delinquency.

Revisiting the effects of self-protective behaviors on the risk of injury in assaults against women.

Using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS; 1992-2005), we closely examined the effects of victims' self-protective actions on the risk of injury among female nonsexual assault victims. Building on previous research, we focused on 3 important methodological and conceptual issues: (a) gradational coding of the 16 different NCVS self-protective actions, (b) separate analyses of serious injuries, and (c) the victim-offender relationship. Our analyses demonstrated that the risk of injury was strongly and positively associated with the degree of forcefulness of self-protective actions. Furthermore, the likelihood of victim injury was inversely related to the relational distance between the victim and the offender.

The relationship between academic achievement and likelihood of police arrest among delinquents.

Drawing upon a recent study on the association between low self-control and differential responses from the criminal justice system, this study examined whether academic performance, a construct linked to self-control, was also associated with the probability of police arrest. The result indicated that academic performance did have a statistically significant inverse association with the likelihood of police arrest, net of low self-control and delinquency.

Disentangling the relationship between child maltreatment and violent delinquency: using a nationally representative sample.

This study uses the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescents (Add Health) data, a nationally representative sample of adolescents, to disentangle the relationship between child maltreatment and violent delinquency. Also examined are potential moderating effects of gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and religiosity on the association between child maltreatment and violent delinquency. Contrary to prior research findings, the current analyses reveal that physical abuse is not associated with future violent delinquency, whereas sexual abuse and neglect predict violent delinquency significantly. The current study also did not reveal any moderating effects of gender, SES, and religiosity on the association between maltreatment and violent delinquency. Interpretations of these findings are presented, drawing on the properties of the national probability sample compared to the findings of most prior studies that used localized samples.

The stability of self-control among South korean adolescents.

Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime has been widely tested. Yet one of their key hypotheses-the stability of self-control-has received little attention from researchers, and no known study has examined the applicability of the stability hypothesis in a non-Western context. Given Gottfredson and Hirschi's claim that their low self-control theory transcends cultural and national boundaries, we tested the hypothesis with a nationally representative sample of South Korean adolescents using 5-year panel data. Consistent with studies conducted in the United States, our results offer partial support for Gottfredson and Hirschi's stability hypothesis. We also provide comparative interpretations of our findings in the South Korean context.