Parenting Practices, Self-Control and Anti-Social Behaviors: Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling
Description
This study aims to clarify the nexus between effective parenting practices, low self-control, and anti-social behaviors in Gottfredson and Hirschi’s General Theory of Crime. The analysis included 72 articles reporting 255 effect sizes (N = 94,604). We used the method of Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling to test the assumptions of GTC. In this regard, we employed Two-Stage meta-analytic Structural Equation Modeling and One Stage Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling to perform MASEM and its moderators. The results of the MASEM of our structural model revealed that low self-control was a positive and significant determinant of anti-social behaviors. Effective parenting practices negatively and significantly affected low self-control. We observed that effective parenting practice has significantly negative direct and indirect effects on anti-social behaviors. That is, low self-control partially mediated the relationship between effective parenting practices and anti-social behaviors. Consistent with the construct of aggregated effective parenting practices, we found uniform patterns for models performed across the elements of effective parenting practices (i.e., emotionally supportive practices, monitoring, recognition, and effective discipline) with low self-control and anti-social behaviors. The result of moderator analyses showed that the association between low self-control and anti-social behaviors tended to be stronger when the individualistic score of countries improved. We hypothesized: 1. Negative effects of effective parenting practices on low self-control, and positive effects of low self-control on anti-social behaviors. 2. Negative effects of effective parenting practices and their elements (i.e., emotionally supportive practices, monitoring, recognition, and effective discipline) would significantly affect anti-social behaviors after controlling for the effect of low self-control. In other words, the effect of effective parenting practices and their elements would both directly influence anti-social behaviors as well as indirectly influence it via low self-control (i.e., the relationship between effective parenting practices and their elements with anti-social behaviors is partially mediated by low self-control). 3. The relationship among effective parenting practices, low self-control, and anti-social behaviors, in model representing the data best, is invariant according to mean age, individualism score, female percentage, kinds of anti-social behavior, mode of assessment, self-control measurements, and the kind of design that data was extracted from.