deliquency of chinese canadian youth

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28n Part I: An Introduction to Inquiry

3,167 offenses, or an average of about 10 offenses per person. However, a majority of

these offenses were quite minor, such as truancy (384 incidents), violation of copyrightlaws (809 incidents), and uttering threats of assault (273 incidents). Nonetheless, more se-rious offenses such as assaults (610 incidents) and thefts (376 incidents) were not uncom-mon among the respondents. About 85 percent of the respondents claimed that they had

committed at least one of the 21 acts in the past year, and 40 percent of the respondentsadmitted comm itting at least 10 of the acts listed.

Findings

The opportunity hypothesis predicts that adherenc e to Chinese culture increases the likeli-

hood of involvemen t in delinquenc y due to the increase in illegitimate opportunities. Con-

versely speaking, acculturation to Canadian society should reduce illegitimate opportunities

and delinquency involvement. However, the results did not lend much support to this oppor-

tunity hypothesis. The observed e ffect of acculturation indicated that adherence to Chinese

culture reduced rather than increased delinquency involvement. Therefore, the direction of

the effect was just the opp osite of what was pre dicted by opportunity theory.

The hypothesis derived from control theory proposes that adherence to Chinese cul-

ture reduces delinquency due to commitments to the traditional family and moral values.

If that is true, then comm itments to the family and moral values should me diate the effectof adherence to Chinese culture on delinquency. Once the effects of these mediating fac-

tors are removed, the effect of adherence to Chinese culture on delinquency should be sig-

nificantly reduced. H owever, the effect o f behavioral acculturation on delinquency did not

decrease much even after controlling for the effects of moral values and family commit-

ment. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that much of the effect of behavioral accul-

turation was not mediated by strong moral values or family commitment. This finding

challenges control theory, which argues that Chinese are more conforming because of

their cultural emphases on the traditional family and strong moral values.

To test the hypothesis derived from intergeneration conflict theory, the dependent

variable of acculturation and subsample comparison was made based on the English profi-

ciency of parents. The intergenera tion conflict hypothesis predicts that the generation gap

is widened by acculturation among those whose parents are less acculturated, and the

widened g ap, in turn, causes delinquency to increase. Consistent with this hypothesis, the

observed effect of behavioral acculturation on delinquency was significant and positive

for those whose parents had low Eng lish proficiency, whereas the effect wa s much wea ker

for the high-proficiency group. Perhaps the English proficiency of parents measures only

one area o f acculturation, and, given the limitation of the data, it may be m ore appropriate

to concentrate on the language gap rather than the acculturation gap between parents and

the child. Therefore, the effect of language acculturation on delinquency was estimated

for the two subsamples. That is, those who used English more often were more likely to

have comm itted delinquency, probably due to a widened language gap between them and

their parents. On the other hand, for those wh ose parents were m ore proficient in English,

language acculturation had no significant effect on delinquency, just as it was predicted by

the theory. Again, the observed effect lends considerable support to the intergeneration

conflict hypothesis.

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