Record: Robert A. Thomson and Sung Joon Jang, “Homeschool and Underage Drinking: Is It More Protective than Public and Private Schools?” in Deviant Behavior 37, no. 3 (2016): 281-301. [Abstract]
Summary: Thomson is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at Baylor University, and Jang is a Research Professor of Criminology and Co-Director of the Program on Prosocial Behavior at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. Here they look at the underage drinking of homeschoolers as compared to their peers in public and private schools.
There are two theories of delinquency that may influence homeschoolers. First, the social bonding theory says that adolescents are less likely to engage in delinquency when they have strong attachments to their families, exhibit commitment to conventional goals, participate in conventional activities, and have prosocial beliefs. Second, the social learning theory proposes that delinquency is learned through imitating or associating with people who engage in delinquent acts, and that delinquency is is conditioned through reward/punishment schedules. Furthermore, the authors note that researchers in the criminology of religion have consistently found that religiosity has both direct and indirect effects on delinquency. Therefore, they hypothesize that homeschoolers are less likely to drink alcohol and get drunk than their peers.
The data comes from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a nationally representative longitudinal telephone survey. It was first conducted in 2002-2003 and again in 2005 with 78.6% of the original respondents returning. Interviews were conducted with teenagers aged 13-18.5 (16-20 in the second phase), as well as a parent of each child. There is more information about the sample and survey methodology on the NSYR’s website.
Alcohol use was measured on a seven-point scale ranging from (1) “Never” to (7) “Almost every day” or “Once a day or more.” Getting drunk ranged from (1) “Never” to (6) “More than once a week.” For school choice, responses were coded as either homeschool, public school, or private school. Finally, the researchers combined the results of several questions to form categories that represent the social bonding theory, the social learning theory, and religiosity. To measure the social bonding theory, the researchers joined together questions about the relationship between the child and the parents, the extent of the parents’ monitoring, the amount of activities that teens and parents participate in together, the strength of parents’ disapproval of deviant behaviors, and the teen’s perception of school. For the social learning theory, they joined together questions about the number of drug-using friends, the number of friends who have gotten in trouble for things like cheating/fighting/skipping classes, and the extent of parents’ punishment for wrongdoing. Finally, to measure religiosity, they used questions about the importance of religion, church attendance, Bible reading, and the number of religious friends.
The results were controlled for age, gender, race/ethnicity, region, household income, and having a two-parent household. They also constructed two alternative variables that are not based off the social bonding/learning theories but that may still influence delinquency. The first is an amalgamation of factors that may influence delinquency like being teased by other teenagers, dissatisfaction with one’s body, and the number of parental breakups. The second alternative explanation for juvenile delinquency was based off the parents’ perception of the teen’s temper as well as the teen’s perception of their depression and tendency to take risks.
Next Thomson and Jang move into their results. As expected, homeschool students tended to drink alcohol and get drunk less often than their counterparts in public and private schools. Social bonding and social learning variables were not very significant, but homeschooled students were more likely to perceive parental monitoring of their media usage and their social activities than their private school peers. Furthermore, homeschooled teens reported fewer deviant friends than their public school peers. They also read the Bible alone more often than their public school peers, and they had more religious friends than peers at both public and private schools.
Control variables tended to affect drinking in the expected direction. For example, the prevalence of drinking increased with age and income, but it decreased when the teen came from a two-parent home. Whites and males were more likely to drink than their Black/Hispanic and Female counterparts.
Jang and Thomson found that of all the variables they tested (i.e. the social bonding theory, the social learning theory, etc.), religiosity was by far the most successful in explaining the difference between homeschoolers, public schoolers, and private schoolers. It decreased the baseline coefficients of public and private school by 33% (from .67 to .45) and 22% (from .68 to .53) respectively. The importance of the respondent’s religious beliefs, reading the Bible alone, and having religious friends were found to decrease drinking, while merely attending religious services did not. When it came to getting drunk, the differences between public schoolers and homeschoolers became insignificant when controlling for religiosity. Therefore, near the end of the article the authors propose the idea that if homeschooling parents become more concerned with pedagogy than ideology, we might see alcohol consumption increase among homeschoolers. However, for the moment, homeschooled teens were less likely to drink and get drunk than the public and private schooled peers partly because they have less deviant friends, more stringent parental monitoring, and stronger religious convictions. In contrast to what what homeschool proponents say, increased family ties and a greater commitment to education did not have a large influence on drinking.
Appraisal: While Thomson and Jang make some questionable and unfounded assumptions in the literature review section, the rest of the article is a good complement to the other studies that have recently emerged on this subject like Vaughn et al. (2015) and Green-Hennessy (2014). Their data from the NSYR corroborate with the findings of the NSDUH that homeschoolers are in fact less likely to drink alcohol and get drunk than their peers in other types of schools. However, since the other studies are more focused on the statistics rather than the causes, this study is helpful. The important take-away from this study is that if parents want their child to avoid drinking alcohol (and likely other deviant behaviors), fostering authentic religious convictions in the child is probably more important than what kind of school they attend.
And how does a parent foster authentic religious convictions in a child? This study suggests that one route over which parents have some control is through the type of friends children have. Uecker’s 2008 study based on the same NSYR data found that the level of parental religious commitment and practice was the single most important variable in predicting a child’s own religious commitment–far outweighing the kind of school a child attended. Homeschooling thus is not itself the cause of heightened child religiosity (and hence decreased delinquency), but it is a correlation, since parents with intense personal faith commitments and a strong desire to have their children be surrounded by children of other intensely religious parents often homeschool.
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