Date of Award

2001

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

First Advisor

Pamela Nickels

Second Advisor

Eddie Doerr

Third Advisor

Anita Sankar

Abstract

Adolescent crimes continue to climb in number and level of violence despite efforts to curtail them. Little research has been done on the impact of family interaction styles on adolescent crime. This study attempts to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis that adolescents who are incarcerated are more likely to score their families as having a rigid family interaction style based on the FACES III adaptability scale than adolescents who are not incarcerated. The family adaptability scores of approximately 50 adolescents in a midwestern lock down facility were compared to those of approximately 50 students selected from a midwestern church and a public school where no adolescent family members have been incarcerated. Results of the study failed to confirm the hypothesis that adolescents who score their families as rigid on the adaptability scale were more likely to be incarcerated than adolescents who did not . Size restrictions and modified usage of test instrumentations limit generalizability of the results.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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