Asian American and Pacific Islander adolescents: The role of parental monitoring, association with deviant peers and ethnic identity on problem behavior.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The relationships between parental monitoring (PM), association with deviant peers (ADP) and problem behavior (PB, such as conduct problems, delinquency, etc.) has long been established in the literature in adolescents from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, including Latino/a, African American, and European American adolescents. To date, less is known about these relationships in Asian American and Pacific Islander adolescents. In addition, little has been studied about the potential role of adolescents' ethnic identity (EI) development in these two ethnic groups in understanding the relationships of PM, ADP, and PB. In this study, I utilized a sample of adolescents from one school in a suburban area in Hawaii (N=416) to test the relationships among PM, ADP, and PB found in previous research and to explore the potential moderating effect of ethnic identity on these relationships specifically for Asian American (n=233) and Pacific Islander (n=88) adolescent subgroups. Similar to past research, results of this study confirmed that the PM was negatively associated with PB, PM was negatively associated with ADP, and ADP was positively associated with PB for the entire sample (N=416). This finding also held for the Asian American adolescents (N=233) when analyzed separately. Unlike for the entire sample and the Asian American groups, for Pacific Islander adolescents parental monitoring was not significantly related to association with deviant peers nor to problem behavior, although ADP and PB were positively correlated. Multiple regression was then used to examine the potential moderating effect of EI on the relationships between PM, ADP, and PB. Findings of these analyses revealed that EI did not moderate the relationships between PM, ADP, and AB for Asian American adolescent, nor for Pacific Islander adolescents, with one exception: for Pacific Islander adolescents, as predicted, low ethnic identity was significantly associated with high participation in problem behavior. Limitations of this study and implications for future research are discussed.