Adolescent Behavior and Family Relationships

Julia V. Overturf, U.S. Census Bureau
Barbara Downs, U.S. Census Bureau

This poster uses data from the Adolescent Self-Administered Questionnaire (SAQ) fielded during the 1998 and 2001 waves of the Survey of Program Dynamics (SPD). The SAQ asks adolescents aged 12 to 17 to report on many aspects of their lives, including, but not limited to, their relationships with parents, family responsibilities, school attitudes and behaviors, and risk behaviors such as drinking, smoking, illegal drug use, and sex and pregnancy. The 1998 wave of the SAQ interviewed 3259 adolescents (58% response rate), and the 2001 wave interviewed 5586 adolescents (79% response rate). Social science research has demonstrated that parental involvement affects adolescent behavior, primarily through monitoring behavior on the part of parents. Parents who spend more time supervising their children have children who engage in fewer risky behaviors (Christopher et al 1993; Donovan and Jessor 1985; Perkins et al 1998; Shilts 1991; Small and Luster 1994; Wilder and Watt 2002). Recent research also indicates that the quality of the mother-daughter relationship influences the age at which teen girls first engage in sex (McNeely et al 2002). Likewise, our research finds that children whose parents are more knowledgeable about their friends and social activities are less likely to engage in risky behaviors. Additionally, children whose parents are separated or divorced also benefit from the involvement of their non-residential parent. We find that those who spend more nights sleeping over at their non-resident parent’s house are significantly less likely to engage in sexual behavior. Another aspect of parental monitoring is the amount of responsibility parents give children for household upkeep. This responsibility can be a positive or negative influence on teen behavior. Children who have more household responsibilities may actually have less parental monitoring. That is, their parents may be home less often, thus the children take on more adult roles. Conversely, some children may have more parental monitoring and thus more chores to ensure their continued involvement in the family. We examine the relationship between the amount of chores children have around the house and their engagement in risk behaviors. Of course, individual and family characteristics may also affect the likelihood of children engaging in risk behaviors. We examine a number of relationships in order to determine whether boys or girls are more likely to engage in risky behavior, as well as investigating whether living with a single parent or in a household receiving public assistance increases the incidence of risky behavior. The results of these analyses, when compared across time, provide evidence of change in the behavior of young adolescents. Finally, because this survey was administered either over the telephone, with a trained interviewer, or in private, with the adolescents listening to the questions using headphones, we test mode of administration differences in question responses. Answering personal questions over the telephone, rather than in private, may lead adolescents to give more socially desirable responses (Hoyt and Chaloupka 1994; Schuman and Presser 1981). In our research we examine whether adolescents give more socially desirable responses to interviewers in response to questions about their family relationships and risk behaviors. Attached are several crosstabulations showing the associations between parental monitoring, family or household responsibilities, and adolescent risk behaviors, using the 2001 wave of the SAQ. These tabulations are a brief summary of the data presented in this poster. The results presented demonstrate the utility of the SPD SAQ data for studying adolescent risk behavior and its predictors.