This study reexamines the relevance of religiosity to the etiology of delinquency, given the inconsistent and inconclusive evidence found in the literature. Like previous researchers, the authors test whether the effects of religiosity on delinquency are spurious or completely indirect via social bonding, social learning, and sociodemographic variables. Unlike previous researchers, however, the authors (1) control for measurement errors in estimating the structural effects of religiosity on delinquency by applying a latent-variable modeling approach and (2) analyze longitudinal data collected from a nationally representative sample of adolescents in the United States. The effects of religiosity on delinquency are found independent of the theoretical and statistical controls while being partly mediated by nonreligious variables of social control and socialization. They also find some evidence of bidirectional causal relationships between religiosity and other predictors of delinquency and briefly discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.

Attachment to parents and commitment to school are important buffers against delinquency. Adolescents who are emotionally bonded to their parents and who succee...

This paper empirically evaluates Broidy and Agnew’s propositions, in which they apply general strain theory to explain gender differences in crime and deviance, by analyzing data from a national survey of adult African Americans. First, African American women were more likely to report strains related to physical health, interpersonal relations, gender roles in the family, and less likely to mention work‐related, racial as well as job strain than African American men. Second, African American women were less likely than African American men to turn to deviant coping strategies when they experienced strain partly because their strains were more likely to generate self‐directed emotions, such as depression and anxiety, which in turn were less likely to lead to deviant coping behaviors than other‐directed, angry emotion. Finally, it was found that the self‐directed emotions were more likely to result in nondeviant, legitimate coping behaviors than other‐directed emotion, anger.