A Social Psychological Study on Some Restrained Factors of Juvenile Delinquency

Research Project

Project/Area Number	13834003
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Institution	Toyo University
Principal Investigator	NAKASATO Yoshimasa The faculty of Sociology Professor, 社会学部, 教授 (30058036)
Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha)	KOBAYASHI Hisakazu National Institute of Police Science Chief Researcher, 補導研究室, 室長 MATSUI Hiroshi Kawamura Gakuen Women's Univ. Professor, 文学部, 教授 (00095465) MATSUMOTO Tsuneyuki The faculty of Sociology Professor, 社会学部, 教授 (10058018)
Project Period (FY)	2001 – 2002
Project Status	Completed (Fiscal Year 2002)
Budget Amount *help	¥2,900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,900,000) Fiscal Year 2002: ¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000) Fiscal Year 2001: ¥1,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,500,000)
Keywords	Delinquency / Restrained Factors / Parent-child relationship / Altruism / Morality / Value system / Shame / International comparison
Research Abstract	1. Purpose: There were mainly three purposes in this study. Those were summarized as follows; 1) The first purpose was to find out the effective restrained factors of delinquent behavior. We set up four factors as restrained factors of delinquency, i.e., altruistic attitudes, moral attitude, value system, shame. At the same time, we measured a level of permissiveness toward delinquent acts in order to predict possible occurrences of delinquent acts. 2) The second purpose was to investigate the relations between parent-child relationship and the restrained factors in relation to formation process of those factors. 3) The third purpose was to consider a distinctive feature of the delinquent attitudes of Japanese youths compared with the data from The U.S. and Turkey. 2. Subjects: The total numbers of the subjects in this study were 5,808. Exact number of the subjects in three countries are as follows; 1) Japan (1,406 junior high and high school students and 1,984 their father and mother), … More 2) The U.S. (548 junior high and high school students and 473 their fathers and mother), 3) Turkey (506 junior high and high school students and 896 their father and mother). 3. Results and Consideration: 1) There were significant relations between the level of delinquent attitudes and each of the restrained factors of delinquency. This means that the restrained factors we set up have a certain power to control youths' delinquent behavior. 2) There were significant relations between the psychological distance to their parents and each of the restrained factors. This means that parents-child relationship is very important to strengthen child's restrained attitudes toward delinquency. 3) Japanese youths showed that their attitudes toward delinquency were not so good as compared with the youths in foreign countries. And also, the parents-child relationship in Japan was very much undesirable. 4) From the results of this study, we concluded that the recent problems related to juvenile delinquency in Japan are mostly caused by the undesirable parents-child relationship. Less