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Does the Relationship Between Poor Reading and Delinquency Hold for Males of Different Ages and Ethnic Groups?

EUGENE MAGUIN received his PhD from Michigan State University in developmental psychology in 1991 and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests concern the role of schooling in the development of delinquency and substance use. Address: Eugene Maguin, Life History Studies, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, 3811 O'Hara St., Pittsburgh, PA 15213.

Rolf Loeber

ROLF LOEBER received his doctorate in clinical psychology from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, after earlier training in Holland. He is currently a codirector of the Life History Studies program in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. His interests concern the development of antisocial behavior, delinquency, and substance use.

Paul G. LeMahieu

PAUL G. LEMAHIEU has received degrees from the University of Pittsburgh (PhD), Harvard University (EdM), and Yale University (BA). He currently serves as director of the Delaware Educational Research and Development Center at the University of Delaware and as Deputy State Superintendent of Education for Educational Policy in Delaware. His research interests include mental assessment and educational policy and practice.

The study examines the relationship between reading and delinquency for three large community samples of first-, fourth-, and seventh-grade African-American and white boys. Reading was correlated with delinquency, independent of neighborhood, SES, ethnicity, and family involvement effects. Although more African-American boys were delinquent than white boys, the likelihood of delinquency for boys with lower reading performance was the same in each ethnic group. Older boys with poor reading performance did not have a higher probability of delinquency than younger boys with poor reading performance. Thus, the association between reading performance and delinquency appears constant over the age range studied. When attention problems was entered as a control variable, it overshadowed reading performance in its association with delinquency. The seriousness of delinquent acts linearly increased the worse the reading performance for white boys in all three grades and for African-American boys in two out of the three grades. However, this linear relationship disappeared when attention problems were taken into account.

Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, Vol. 1, No. 2, 88-100 (1993)
DOI: 10.1177/106342669300100202


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