Parental Monitoring, Exposure to Family Violence, and Delinquency: A Latent Class Analysis on Arizona Youth

For youth between the 8th and the 12th grades, parents and adult caretakers play a critical role in shaping their behaviors. The parent-youth relationship has several important dimensions, and each plays a unique role in preventing youth delinquency. The current study seeks to explore the heterogeneity among youth in Arizona regarding parental neglect, parental monitoring, and exposure to family violence. We further investigated how these family characteristics correlated with self-reported delinquency. We analyzed survey data collected from a sample of youth from Arizona (n = 38,945) and used latent class analysis (LCA) to capture these family properties. We identified a five-group model suggesting that these dimensions did not necessarily overlap. We also found that group membership was correlated with self-reported arrests as well as multiple delinquent behaviors. Youth with low exposure to family violence and from families with effective monitoring had the lowest probability of engaging in delinquent behaviors. Insufficient parental monitoring and exposure to family violence had slightly different correlates for different types of delinquency.