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Brigham Young University
The purpose of this project is to test the correlation between religiosity and delinquent behavior in LDS youth. During the past eight years, Chadwick and Top have conducted research among LDS high school students testing whether these youth do in fact INTERNALIZE religious principles that influence their behavior.
To test the religion-delinquency link, Chadwick and Top have tested a multivariate model that included peer influences, school experiences, personality traits and family characteristics and processes along with several measures of religiosity. A strong relationship between religiosity and delinquency has been found among LDS youth living in Utah Valley, along the East Coast, the Pacific Northwest, and Great Britain.
Though peers were found to be the strongest predictor of delinquency, religiosity was the second strongest factor. Chadwick and Top also found that although family characteristics did not have a DIRECT relationship with delinquency, it had a powerful INDIRECT relationship to delinquency among LDS teenagers.
The next phase of this research program is to test whether these findings are unique to the United States and other English speaking modern nations. Researchers plan to collect data from LDS teens in Central and South America and in Germany and Austria. They hypothesize that the influence of family and faith will be similar in these cultures to that found in the United States and Great Britain.