Sibling Delinquency as a Risk Factor for Future Offending

Date01 October 2018
DOI10.1177/1541204017713255
Published date01 October 2018
Subject MatterArticles
YVJ713255 343..357 Article
Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
2018, Vol. 16(4) 343-357
Sibling Delinquency as a Risk
ª The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1541204017713255
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An Exploratory Analysis
Glenn D. Walters1
Abstract
Prior research has identified parents and peers as salient risk factors for delinquency. The purpose of
the current investigation was to determine whether sibling delinquency might not also serve as a risk
factor for future offending net the effects of parents and peers. Participants were 215 male fourth
through tenth grade predominately White students from the Oregon Screening of Youth at Risk for
Delinquency sample. A series of multiple linear regression analyses revealed that sibling delinquency
predicted participant delinquency 5 years later, after age, prior delinquency, number of siblings,
father absence, family socioeconomic status, parental monitoring, parental disciplinary style, parental
acceptance, and peer delinquency were controlled. When the sample was divided into younger (age
9–12 at Wave 1) and older (age 13–17 at Wave 1) age-groups, the predictive effect of sibling
delinquency was confined to the older subgroup. The results suggest that sibling delinquency may
serve as a risk factor for criminal offending in adolescents who are subsequently reevaluated in
emerging adulthood but not children who were subsequently reevaluated in adolescence. These
findings indicate that sibling delinquency can serve as a risk factor for future offending and as a target
for intervention in the treatment of delinquency.
Keywords
sibling delinquency, delinquency prediction, multiple linear regression
Parental support and control, in addition to peer relations, are among the most widely studied social–
environmental risk factors in the delinquency field. With respect to parenting, research shows that
parental support and control are equally powerful predictors of delinquent behavior (Barnes &
Farrell, 1992; Hoeve, Dubas, Eichelsheim, van der Laan, & Gerris, 2009; Wright & Cullen,
2001). These findings are consistent with Hirschi’s (1969) social bonding theory of delinquency
and Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) general theory of crime, respectively. Negative peer associa-
tions have also been found to predict delinquency, so much so that the peer effect may eclipse the
parenting effect once a child enters adolescence (Mears & Field, 2002). Similar to parenting, two
peer-related effects have been identified for delinquency: the peer influence or socialization effect
1 Department of Criminal Justice, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Glenn D. Walters, Department of Criminal Justice, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA 19530, USA.
Email: walters@kutztown.edu

344
Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 16(4)
(Gifford-Smith, Dodge, Dishion, & McCord, 2005; Haynie & Osgood, 2005) and the peer selection
effect, also known as homophily (Chapple, 2005; Kiesner, Kerr, & Stattin, 2004). While the peer
influence effect supports social learning theories of crime (Akers, 1998; Sutherland, 1947), the peer
selection effect resonates with Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) general theory of crime. One
theoretical approach that may encompass both sets of parental and peer factors is the risk factor
prevention paradigm (Farrington, 2000; Hawkins & Catalano, 1992).
A risk factor, by definition, predicts an increased probability of future aggressive or offending
behavior (Farrington, 2000). According to the risk factor prevention paradigm, several different
categories of risk are responsible for youth violence and delinquency. These include personal risk,
family risk, peer and social risk, and community risk (Mercy, Butchart, Farrington, & Cerda, 2002).
Personal risk factors may be biological or psychological in nature, family risk factors encompass
both parenting behavior and interpersonal relationships within the home, peer and social risk factors
cover peer influence and rejection as well as gang affiliations, and community risk factors include
physical and psychological characteristics of the neighborhood, social inequality, and various cul-
tural influences. Although parenting and peer risk factors were emphasized in the current investi-
gation, all four major categories of risk are represented in this study: personal (age and prior
delinquency), family (parental monitoring, discipline and acceptance, and sibling delinquency),
peer (peer delinquency), and community (family socioeconomic status [SES] and father absence).
The research question upon which the current investigation was based asked whether a family risk
factor (sibling delinquency) was capable of predicting future delinquency net the effect of well-
established personal, parental, peer, and community risk factors.
Research indicates that parenting and peer risk factors may not operate independent of one
another. The results of several studies, in fact, suggest that parental support/control and peer influ-
ence combine to produce an additive effect for delinquency (Deutsch, Crockett, Wolff, & Russell,
2012; Henneberger, Tolan, Hipwell, & Keenan, 2014). Tung and Lee (2014), by comparison, found
evidence of a Parenting Peer interaction such that harsh parental discipline exerted a criminogenic
effect on a child but only when paired with a moderate to high degree of peer rejection. As important
as these results are, it is imperative that we not close ourselves off to other potentially salient social
risk factors when attempting to predict delinquency and crime. One such social risk factor is sibling
delinquency. Studies on family size (Jones, Offord, & Abrams, 1980), family criminality (Rowe,
Linver, & Rodgers, 1996), and the unequal distribution of crime across families (Farrington, Barnes,
& Lambert, 1996; Lauritsen, 1993) all suggest that delinquency may be transmitted within families
and between siblings. Farrington, Barnes, and Lambert (1996), for instance, found that 64% of the
adult convictions recorded by male participants in the Cambridge Study of Delinquency Develop-
ment could be traced to 10% of the families participating in the study. Even more telling, Rowe,
Linver, and Rodgers (1996) recorded a mean correlation of .35 between siblings for delinquency,
compared to an average correlation of only .12 for various personality traits.
Much of the early research on delinquency in siblings focused on fundamental structural char-
acteristics such as sex, age spacing, and number of siblings. The results of these studies revealed that
same-sex sibling dyads achieved greater concordance for delinquency than opposite-sex sibling
dyads (Rowe & Farrington, 1997), younger boys were more apt to imitate the delinquent behavior
of an older brother than younger girls were to emulate the delinquent behavior of an older sister
(Slomkowski, Rende, Conger, Simons, & Conger, 2001), siblings born closer together were more
similar in delinquency than siblings born further apart (Bank, Patterson, & Reid, 1996), and families
with more children produced higher rates of delinquency than families with fewer children (Brown-
field & Sorenson, 1994; Lauritsen, 1993). Because most of these studies failed to control for other
social–environmental risk factors like family environment, parenting, and peer associations, it could
be argued that sibling similarity in delinquency is nothing more than shared family environment,
analogous parenting, or a common peer group. Rowe and Gulley (1992), for instance, determined

Walters
345
that greater mutual warmth between siblings led to a sibling effect but that this effect could not be
understood independent of a shared friend network. By controlling for family and peer effects, it
should be possible to determine whether sibling relationships increase risk for delinquency inde-
pendent of these other social risk factors.
Besides failing to control for alternate social risk factors, most studies on sibling delin-
quency have employed cross-sectional research designs. This, however, does not mean that
there have not been any longitudinal studies. Garcia, Shaw, Winslow, and Yaggi (2000), for
instance, used prospective data to study the interaction between sibling conflict and parental
rejection in a group of 180 5-year-old boys and their close-age siblings. Controlling for family
SES, early externalizing behavior, and age differences between siblings, Garcia et al. (2000)
discovered that destructive sibling conflict and parental rejection at age 2 predicted mother- and
teacher-rated aggression at ages 5 and 6 but only when sibling conflict and parental rejection
were present. Although the interaction between sibling conflict and parental rejection failed to
predict mother-rated delinquency, the main effect of sibling conflict was significant. In two
other longitudinal studies, Criss and Shaw (2005) discerned that sibling conflict predicted
participant delinquency when controlling for a negative mother–child relationship, and Storm-
shak, Comeau, and Shepard (2004) ascertained that sibling deviance predicted participant
substance use after peer deviance had been controlled.
A study by Fagan and Najman (2003) on 374 same- and mixed-sex sibling pairs also explored the
relationship between sibling delinquency and future participant offending. Controlling for child (sex
and childhood aggression), mother (age, education, anxiety, marital changes, and intimate partner
violence), and family (number of male children,...

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