Social Relationships

  • Romantic Relationships and Children: Questions that assess participants’ romantic relationships, involvement with children (if any) and whether participants’ marital status changed since the last interview.
    • Compiled based on a review of existing measures.
  • Primary Caregiver: Participants are asked to specify the person who is primarily responsible for taking care of them. Follow-up questions regarding whether this caregiver lives with the youth and the caregiver’s health are asked as well.
  • Parental Monitoring: 15 questions that address the degree to which the primary caretaker tries to know and actually knows the youth’s activities/behavior as well as household rules regarding supervision.
    • Adapted from: Steinberg, L., Dornbusch, S., and Darling, N.  (1992).  Impact of parenting practices on adolescent achievement.  Authoritative parenting, school involvement, and encouragement to succeed.  Child Development, 63, 1266-1281.
  • Relationship Warmth/Hostility: 21 items each regarding the affective tones of the youth’s relationships with his parent, friends, and romantic partner.
    • Adapted from: Conger, R., Ge, X., Elder, G., Jr. Lorenz, F., & Simons, R. (1994).  Economic stress, coercive family process, and developmental problems of adolescents.  Child Development, 65, 541-561.
  • Association with Deviant Peers and Gang Involvement: This measure assesses friends’ antisocial behavior (13 items) and antisocial influence (7 items) as well as the youths’ gang involvement. (Note: The same questions are asked twice more by substituting “girlfriend” and “parents” for peers).  Additionally, youth are asked to state 5 of their closest friends and follow-up questions assess the degree of contact youth has with each of these peers, the peers’ ages and sex, whether any of these friends have been to jail, been arrested, done drugs, and been to mental hospital
    • Adapted from: Thornberry, T., Lizotte, A., Krohn, M., Farnworth, M., & Jang, S. (1994). Delinquent peers, beliefs, and delinquent behavior: A longitudinal test of interactional theory. Criminology, 32, 47-83.
  • Peer Conflict Scale (PCS): 40-item scale was designed to improve existing measures of aggression within peer groups and assesses four aggression categories: proactive overt (I start fights to get what I want), proactive relational (I gossip about others to become popular), reactive overt (When someone hurts me, I end up getting into a fights), and reactive relational (If others make me mad, I tell their secrets).  Response options range from 0 (not at all true) to 3 (definitely true).
    • Adapted from: Marsee, M. A., Kimonis, E. R., & Frick, P. J. (2004). Peer conflict scale. Unpublished rating scale, University of New Orleans.
    • Marsee, M. A., Silverthorn, P., & Frick, P. J. (2005). The association of psychopathic traits with aggression and delinquency in non- referred boys and girls. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 23, 803–817.
  • Family Criminality: This section includes questions that assess whether (and if so, who) any family members have been involved in criminal activity, arrested, and jailed.  Follow-up questions also inquire whether each the criminally involved family member was living with the youth at the time of the crime.
    • Compiled based on a review of existing measures.