Religiosity and Violence Among Adolescents in the United States: Findings From the National Survey

Some studies have studied youth violence and wealth status (Mok et al., 2018) while some have also analyzed delinquency with poverty (Jarjoura, 2002), the present study further examined relationship between religious affiliation and the prevalence of violence among the youth. The study also aimed to examine the difference in the relationship of violence and religious affiliation as impacted by the financial status and exposure to delinquent friendships and predict youth violence susceptibility within the at-risk population. The findings of the current study validate our first hypothesis that religiosity, was associated with youth violence regardless of the religious identity, however, moderations by demographics were not analyzed.
Also, to study the effect of delinquent friends on the relationship between religiosity and youth violence, it was observed that when religious youth are exposed to peers who are rated high in delinquency, we realized the effect of delinquent friendship on youth violence is high and delinquent friends may reduce the impact of religiosity on the youth violence and conversely may serve as a shielding influence that reduces the effect of religiosity on the prevalence of violence. The same is partially in line with the previous studies that predicted the shielding effects of religiosity on delinquent friendships (Desmond, Soper, & Kraus, 2011).

Tests undertaken using STATA 17:
Three regression analyses were conducted. Firstly, Linear regression of violent behavior and religious affiliation was undertaken as explained in Model 1 of table 3. Secondly, multivariate regression was conducted by adding delinquent friend to the previous regression model. A suppression (change in r2 and coefficient and t statistics) was noticed post addition of a new independent variable to the model. For the interaction model, we created an interaction variable and checked the moderating effect on the regression model by addition of free reduced lunch in the regression model.