Direct Supervision and Delinquency: Assessing the Adequacy of Structural Proxies

This research tests the hypothesis that children who grow up in families that carefully and consistently monitor children's behavior will be less delinquent than children in families where supervision is lax and~or haphazard. Although research operationalizing direct supervision in family interactional terms has supported this hypothesis, research using structural proxies f o r direct supervision (i.e., family size, broken home, and employed mother) has tended to show negligible effects. This research tests the direct supervision hypothesis using a more parsimonious structural p r o x y the ratio o f adults to children in a househoM. It is hypothesized that this ratio will be negatively related to delinquency, and that it will be a stronger predictor o f delinquency than more common structural measures. Using data f rom the 1986 wave o f the Monitoring the Future survey (Bachman, Johnston, and O'Malley, 1986), bivariate and multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models reveal that none o f the structural variables, including the ratio o f adults to children, are good predictors o f delinquency. These results support Wells and Rankin's (1958) contention that family structural proxies are inadequate f o r testing the specific family functional processes on which direct supervision hinges.