This study aims at figuring out main factors that influence on an act of running away so as to enable to explain why teenagers attempt to run away by disclosing a relationship between a runaway compulsion and an act of runaway and confirming a critica...
This study aims at figuring out main factors that influence on an act of running away so as to enable to explain why teenagers attempt to run away by disclosing a relationship between a runaway compulsion and an act of runaway and confirming a critical factor that has an influence on a teenage runaway under the perception that an impulse of running away and an act of running away are different.
This study mainly focuses on the fact that not all youths who experienced the impulse of running away try to leave home so that those who felt the impulse among research subjects were selected in advance, and then a juvenile runaway was set as a dependent variable and factors such as personal character, family environment, peer relations were allotted as independent variables that seem to have an influence on the act of running away by youths who felt an attempt to run away. By doing so, this study is to determine the factor that influenced the most on a runaway of youngsters who experience the impulsion.
To achieve this purpose, a research of “the reality of a Korean children and youths runaway” conducted by National Youth Policy Institute (NYPI) and surveys of a total of 9,725 teenagers by NYPI were utilized. And this study mainly concentrated on 4,103 youths who felt the impulse to run away. To make more persuasive, this study also adds a survey of a 5,712 youths who have not experienced any impulse of running away and, in part, divided into two groups of teens who experienced a runaway compulsion and who did not. The result from analyzing data can be summed up as follows.
First, with a technical statistic, factors such as personal character, family environment and peer relations were reviewed based on the average points of those respectively. When it comes to personal character, points of self-esteem were higher than the average, while those of depression and anxiety were lower than the average.
In terms of family environment, points of the family support were higher than the average, whereas those of children abuse and neglect were lower than the average.
And as for peer relations, points of peer support and peer conformity were well-above the average, while those of peer delinquency remained under the average. Such findings suggest that it is impossible to say that youths with the impulse to run away may have lower self-esteem, suffer from higher depression or anxiety, receive lower support from family, live in an abuse and neglect home, get lower peer support and conformity, and have more peer delinquency experiences. In this regard, this result is a far cry from previous studies. In other words, a teenage runaway should be examined through two different factors: an impulse and an act.
Second, after dividing into two groups of teens who experienced the impulse of runaway and actually conducted a run away, and those who felt the impulse but did not put it into practice, and subsequently independent samples T-test on the two groups were carried out and comparison of the averages was reviewed. A total average gap between the two groups of youths who put the impulse of running away into an action and those who did not was narrow. However the findings confirmed that teenagers who put the impulse into practice had higher depression and anxiety, received lower family support, suffered from severe abuse and neglect from parents and got higher peer conformity and experienced higher peer delinquency.
Third, to confirm the fact that influences the most on a juvenile runaway, a logistic regression analysis was conducted by dividing subjects into three categories.
First of all, in order to figure out whether an impulse influences on an act of running away when teenagers run away, data of a total of 9,725 youths who participated in the research of “the reality of a Korean children and youths runaway” in 2009 was gathered and the fact whether they had a runaway compulsion or not was set as an independent variable. According to the results of examining the data, it was confirmed that the runaway compulsion was statistically significant for the act of teenagers’ runaway. This reconfirms that youths who felt an impulse of running away are highly at stake for putting the impulse into an action.
Next, to understand what the most critical factor is for teenagers who experienced a runaway compulsion and put the compulsion into practice, a logistic regression analysis was performed. According to the results, teenage boys had experienced a run away more and teens who have grown up under single parents, received lower family support, suffered from severe neglect, and experienced more peer delinquency have more chances to leave home.
Lastly, according to the factors that have an influence on the act of running away by youths who do not have any impulse to run away, among them, if they try to run away, there are more chances to be male, and come from single parent environment. And with the verified results from principal factors and based on the results from peer conformity, a statistic document of factors that influenced on the act of running away by youngsters with a runaway compulsion was compared with those of factors that affected the act for running away by youths without any kind of impulse to run away. Within that context, when teenagers without a runaway compulsion attempted to leave home, noticeable differences were two: first is that family environment factor has nothing to do with an act of running away, and second is that the higher peer conformity is, the more influence on the act of running away exists.
Namely it can be translated that youngsters who do not have any impulse to run away may be easier to be affected by peer groups than those who have the impulse and to put it into the act of running away.
Meanwhile youths who felt the impulse to runaway have more tendencies to leave home due to a family environment factor without peer conformity and when comparin