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The effects of early father absence and the level of antisocial behavior on the development of social egocentrism in adolescent Mexican American girls

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The effects of early father absence and the level of antisocial behavior on the development of social egocentrism in adolescent Mexican American girls

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Content THE EFFECTS OF EARLY FATHER ABSENCE AND THE
LEVEL OF ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR ON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL EGOCENTRISM
IN ADOLESCENT MEXICAN
AMERICAN GIRLS
by
Vianne Marie Castellano
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Education)
May 19 78
UMI Number: DP24260
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U N IV E R S IT Y O F S O U T H E R N C A L IF O R N IA
T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L
U N IV E R S IT Y PARK
LOS A N G E LE S . C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
T h is dissertation, w ritte n by
Vianne Marie Castellano
under the direction of k® .?..... Dissertation C o m
mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by T h e G raduate
School, in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t o f requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
LIST OF TABLES
IV
LIST OF FIGURES
v
Chapter
I THE PROBLEM 1
Background of the Problem
Statement of the Problem
Purpose of the Study
Importance of the Study
Operational Definitions of Terms
Research Hypotheses
Assumptions
Delimitations
Literature Providing Theoretical and
Empirical Support for the Relation
ship Between (Persistent) Social
Egocentrism and Antisocial Behavior
Literature Regarding the Effect of
Father Absence on the Development
of Antisocial Behavior in Female
Adolescents
Literature Relating to the Effect of
Father Absence on the Development
of Antisocial Behavior in Mexican
American Adolescents
Literature Providing Support for the
Selection of the Dramatic Acting
Test as a Measure of Social
Egocentrism
II REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE 17
III. METHODOLOGY 56
Selection of the Sample
Instrumentation
Procedure for Data Collection
ii
Chapter Page '
Procedures for Statistical Analysis
of Data
Limitations ;
i
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION '71 '
I
Analysis of Findings
Discussion j
V. SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS 85 :
Summary
Recommendations j
!
BIBLIOGRAPHY 91 ;
APPENDIXES............................................ 99
I
A. The Dramatic Acting Test: A Role ;
Playing Test for Children 100 j
j I
B. Role Playing T e s t 120 '
iii
LIST OF TABLES ;
\
*
Table Page*
1. Pearson Product Moment Correlation
Coefficients for Interrater i
Reliability ............................. 64|
2. Mean Age in Years for All Subjects........... 72,
3. Two-Factor Analysis of Variance Testing 1
the Effect of A g e ............. 74
i
4. Mean Egocentrism Scores for All Subjects . . . 75:
5. Two-Factor Analysis of Variance Testing
the Amount of Egocentrism.................... 76
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Number of subjects in each experimental
c e l l .......................................... 58'
CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM
i
| Juvenile delinquency is a problem of prime public
jconcern in this country. Estimates from the Federal Bureau
of Investigation Records (19 60) indicate that 1 percent of
school age children become legally delinquent each year,
and that 10 percent become delinquent before reaching
maturity. Juvenile offenses increased steadily until the
60th year when the rate begins to decline gradually. The
excessive proportion of juvenile crime suggests the need
for understanding and preventing the development of
delinquent behavior.
Background of the Problem
Previous research in the area of antisocial
(delinquent) behavior has concentrated on the socialization
of males. Although male delinquency has been studied in
great detail, not much research has been directed toward
the delinquent adolescent female.
i Early studies on juvenile delinquency consistently
i
jreported a difference between male and female offenders,
not only in the number and frequency of offenses, but also
in the kind of transgression. Traditionally, most female
delinquency was thought to take the form of overt sexual I
behavior. However, there is some recent evidence that the !
type and frequency of offenses for females is changing from;
sexually oriented "status offenses" toward "more violent,
traditionally male crimes" (Thompson & Lozes, 1976, p. 5).
Thompson and Lozes (1976) completed an investiga
tion which provided some recent evidence of the existence
of a delinquent female subculture. They found that both
the type and frequency of offenses for females was strik-
i
mgly similar to behavior patterns previously considered ;
i
characteristic of male delinquents. The authors concluded j
that females are accounting for a greater percentage of the j
overall increase in juvenile crime.
Family instability has been shown to be a factor in
i !
'the early studies on juvenile delinquency (Glueck & Glueck, ,
I
19 50; Monahan, 19 60; Shaw & McKay, 1931; Toby, 195 7; Tor- j
ranee, 1945). The homes of many delinquent children are *
i
broken long before they reach the official ages of delin- j
quency. In fact, over half of all children under 18 years !
i
of age whose families have been disrupted are under 7 years \
i
of age and about 70 percent of such children are under the !
i
age of 10 (Monahan, 1960). ;
i
Although the effects of a broken home have been
related to delinquency for boys in a majority of the
0
studies there is some evidence to support the idea that !
i
family dynamics may be even more important for the female j
offender than for the male (Glueck & Glueck, 1950; Monahan,!
I
1955, 1957, 1960). Monahan (1960) found that broken homes j
I
are considerably more common among female offenders (both i
iblack and white) than among boys. When one realizes, in j
i
connection with this result, that there are about as many '
I
boys as there are girls who come from broken homes, then |
family instability looms as a rather large factor in female
delinquency.
Related studies on the differential effects of the
I
type of parental absence (divorce, separation, desertion, i
death, or wedlock) indicate that father absence is the i
i
variable most often associated with delinquent behavior in
t
both sons and daughters. The significance of the father's
i
attitudes has been stressed by Peterson, Becker, Hellmer, j
and Shoemaker (1959). Studying the family background of |
I
I
emotionally disturbed children, these investigators found [
that paternal attitudes were as important as those of the 1
i
mother in determining the maladjustment of their offspring, i
i
i
The presence of the father in the home seems to i
have an important influence on the personality and social
adjustment of the daughter(s). In the same context, broken!
*
homes among girls seem to play an important part in their
juvenile difficulties with the law.
3
Other evidence for a connection between lack of !
j
fathering and emotional disorders in females comes from j
studies by Sopchak (1952) and Lazowick (1955). Sopchak |
studied the effects of lack of identification with the
father for females and concluded:
Women with tendencies toward abnormality as measured
by the MMPI show a lack of identification with their j
fathers . . . and identification with the father is
more important in producing normal adjustment than
is identification with the mother. (p. 165)
*
Lazowick has also studied the influence of inadequate i
identification with the father and concluded that a high i
degree of manifest anxiety in (undergraduate) women is
i
related to the absence of adequate father relations. |
Father absence would be a particularly important j
variable in a cultural subgroup which attaches great impor-
i
tance to the paternal role in the family. The Mexican
American family has a strong tradition of male dominance j
within the culture, as well as within the family structure, j
There is some evidence that this pattern is slowly j
changing in Mexican American families, due to Anglo
i
cultural influences, imposed by migration. Derbyshire j
(1969) suggests that, in Los Angeles Mexican American com
munities, male strength and dominance exist only because
females feel it is best to play a subordinate role:
"Females frequently verbalized dissatisfaction with their
husbands' and fathers' positions in the family but give
4
. . . respect out of deference to his loss of status in the I
I
anglo culture" (p. 9 3). However, the importance of the
male continues to be stressed in Mexican American communi- 1
I
!
ties, especially with recent migrant families. Conse
quently, differential father absence would have pervasive
and lasting effects on the personal and social adjustment
of Mexican American girls, and would appear to be related
to their delinquent or antisocial behavior. i
l
i
One possible explanation for the increase in the !
!
number and severity of female offenses might be that the j
delinquent is motivated by the immediate goal of the anti
social act (i.e., money or other material objects) and
fails to consider the consequences for the victim. I
Egocentrism is a concept developed by Piaget
i
(Inhelder & Piaget, 1958; Piaget, 1926, 1950) which relates'
i
to the inability to mediate another person's point of view, i
It can be theoretically defined as a state of fusion
between the self and the environment, characterized by j
narcissism and the lack of ability to differentiate or !
i
sympathize towards others (Looft, 1972). Egocentrism pro- j
vides a stable, though isolated frame of reference through-j
i
out the individual's life span; each maturational stage is |
i
characterized by its own particular form of egocentrism.
Cognitive development in adolescence is marked by
j
the acquisition of formal operational thought. The distin- ■
guishing properties of this stage are represented in terms I
of "propositional" or "abstract" thinking. The adolescent i
now has the ability to conceptualize his own thought, as j
well as the thought of others. However, this higher cogni
tive mode involves the consequent development of new forms
jof egocentrism. Egocentrism in the formal operational 1
! j
jstage is described as the failure to differentiate between j
i
| I
| the "cognitive concerns" of others and those of the self. '
i j
Elkind (196 7) has identified the "crux of adolescent ego- j
centrism" to be the inability to take account of other
people's thought:
This egocentrism emerges because, while the adoles
cent can now cognize the thoughts of others, he ;
fails to differentiate between the objects toward ;
which the thoughts of others are directed and those
which are the focus of his own concerns. (p. 102 9)
Under normal developmental circumstances, this
stage of egocentrism has been shown to give way to a
i
decentering process, which makes possible new levels of !
I
social cooperation and competence in establishing intimate j
(
relationships and taking on an occupation. ;
i
The persistence of social egocentrism in adoles-
i
cence may result in a developmental delay in acquiring j
i
adaptive social skills (i.e., including realistic concepts |
I
of causality relations and spatiality, as well as communi- j
cation abilities and moral judgment). An investigation by !
< |
Chandler (19 73) linked antisocial behavior to the main- ,
;tenance of "persistent social egocentrism" in preadolescent j
I
boys.
6
An earlier study by Gluck (19 72) failed to find a
strong association between egocentricity and sociopathy in
adult male criminals, but this finding was criticized by
its author for a weak experimental design.
Related studies have linked the ability to decenter
(lack of egocentrism) to the development of morality in
children (Stuart, 196 7) and the emergence of conventional
morality in preadolescent girls (Moir, 1974).
Consequently, the maintenance of egocentric thought
patterns in adolescence may contribute to antisocial
behavior because of distortion or the failure of social
adaptive mechanisms. The results of these investigations
suggest the utility of attempting to understand antisocial
behavior in terms of cognitive processes.
Statement of the Problem
The theoretical thought concerning egocentrism,
i
social interaction, and related constructs in children has |
generated a number of empirical studies, including investi- \
gations of empathic ability and role taking skills. Sarbin
(1954) in an early review of role taking skills concluded
that the essential element in any sort of skill sequence in j
!
role taking seems to be a process by which the individual
apprehends certain attributes of another individual. Looft
(19 72) postulated that the gradual decrease of social
7
egocentrism is essential to the development of new levels
of "social cooperation and competence" (p. 75).
The importance of decentering skills in adequate
socialization has prompted a number of studies correlating
the maintenance of "persistent social egocentrism" with the
development of various forms of social deviation (Anthony,
1959; Chandler, 1972, 1973; Feffer, 1970; Glough, 1948;
Martin, 1968; Sarbin, 1954; Thompson, 1968).
Research on this topic has demonstrated the utility
of a measure of persistent social egocentrism as an indica
tor of antisocial (or socially deviant) behavior. However,
the major portion of the research has been constructed on
males or on children, without controlling for the effects
of gender, while there is an inadequate number of studies
investigating this relationship for girls. Gender could
possibly be a confounding variable and must thoroughly be
assessed to determine its effect on the proposed relation
ship. In order to achieve a balanced understanding of the
construct of social egocentrism, as an indicator of anti
social behavior, it is necessary to research this relation
ship in girls.
There is considerable evidence for an interactive
effect between antisocial (delinquent) behavior and early
father separation for boys, but the bulk of these studies
fail to differentiate whether or not the relationship holds
8
for females.
Monahan (195 7) noted that delinquent girls are more
likely to be the product of a broken home than delinquent
boys, and studies by Cohen (1955) show that antisocial
behavior in girls is more often due to sexual misconduct.
Early father separation may then result in disrup
tions in heterosexual behavior for delinquent girls and be
related to persistent social egocentrism. For example,
"unwed motherhood" is classified as one type of juvenile
delinquency, and may be the result of the adolescent's
"personal fable" that: "Pregnancy will happen to others,
and never to them, so they need not take precautions"
(Elkind, 1967, p. 1032).
There is some recent evidence however, that this
is changing and females are becoming involved in more
frequent "male oriented" criminal behaviors (Thompson &
Lozes, 1976). However, the authors note that their find
ings are explainable according to a theory developed by
Cohen (1955) of inadequate sex role socialization.
There has been a significant amount of research to
support the hypothesis that fathers influence their chil
dren's identification more than mothers because of their
differential reinforcements and expectations of sex typed
behavior. Torgoff and Dreyer (1961) have reported findings
which support the importance of the father-daughter
9
relationship in socialization and role orientation. Such
findings add support to the views of theorists who stress
the significance of complementary opposite sex relations
between fathers and daughters (Johnson, 1963; Parsons,
1955; Wright & Tuska, 1966).
The effect of father absence is felt most strongly
in subgroups which place a high value on the position of
the father in the family and culture. The Mexican Ameri
cans are one such subgroup, and a representative community
of them reside in East Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is a major urban area, which has a
particular type of youth crime problem— the juvenile gang.
Most delinquent activity for both males and females occurs
through gang membership or affiliations. In Los Angeles,
it is estimated that almost half of the existing gangs are
Chicano and violence between and among group members is not
uncommon (Stumphauzer, Aiken, & Veloz, 1977).
Although gangs are more common for males than for
females, a trend has been noted in the increase of the
frequency and number of "male oriented" crimes for female
offenders (Thompson & Lozes, 1976). Stumphauzer et al.
(19 77) have further identified a group of adolescent girls
in the East Los Angeles area who associate with the males
of the major gangs.
While the effects of a broken home (particularly
father absence) have long been associated with delinquency
10
in boys (Glueck & Glueck, 1950; Monahan, 1955, 195 7, 196 0)
there is some indication that this may be even a more
important dynamic for female offenders (Monahan, 1960).
For the Mexican American female delinquent, father absence
would be an important factor in her antisocial behavior.
The present study is designed to ascertain the joint effect
(found by Chandler for boys in 1973) of father absence and
the level of antisocial behavior on the persistence of
social egocentrism in Mexican American girls.
Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study was to explore the rela
tionship between early father absence and the level of
antisocial behavior, and to determine its interactive
influence on the development of social egocentrism in
adolescent Mexican American girls.
Importance of the Study
There has been considerable research demonstrating
a relationship between persistent social egocentrism and
antisocial behavior for white, middle class boys, but there
have been no similar studies for any segment of the female
population.
The Mexican American community comprises a major
portion of the East Los Angeles district. Since delin
quency is a persistent social problem in this area, there
11
is a great need for further systematic research into this
phenomenon. There has been scant investigation on the con
cerns of the Mexican American community in general, and the
research focusing on adolescent Mexican American girls is
virtually nonexistent. There is much to learn about sex
and cultural differences in the maintenance of persistent
social egocentrism and its relationship to certain
behavioral and familial variables. This study is an
attempt to get at that issue. It focuses on adolescent
Mexican American girls at the largest "opportunity school"
for females in the Los Angeles Unified School District and
contrasts them with nondelinquent girls, attending a local
public high school.
The findings would be valuable in helping to iden
tify important attitudinal and familial variables which
have a demonstrated relationship to antisocial behavior for
a particular segment of the Mexican American population.
The study will hopefully facilitate subsequent scientific
inquiry by developing reliable evaluative procedures for a
group previously considered difficult to test.
Operational Definitions of Terms
Independent Variables
Family structure. The independent variable "early
father absence" was operationally defined to mean father
12
separation before the age of 5 years. Biller and Bahm
(19 71) found that: "separation before age five is more
disruptive than later separation" (p. 180). For all sub
jects identified as having early father absence, the father
was absent from the subject's 5th year and there was no
substitute male figure (i.e., stepfather or foster father)
living in the home. The family situation of the subject
was ascertained through the use of permission forms for
release of family information sent to the subject's parents.
The term "intact family" was operationally defined
to mean that both biological parents are legally married
and reside at the same home address.
Antisocial behavior. The second independent vari
able "antisocial behavior" was operationally defined in
terms of either high or low antisocial behavior. Subjects
were identified in either category through Los Angeles
County Probation Central Juvenile Index (CJI) records. CJI
is Los Angeles County's probation clearing house for
identifying minor children who have been involved in
offenses within the state of California. This would
include a computer cross check with Criminal Identification
Investigation (CII) records and Federal Bureau of Investi
gation (FBI) records, reflecting any police contacts within
the nation. All subjects having high antisocial behavior
have had one or more contacts with the police and have
13
committed one or more offenses that would have constituted
a felony if committed by an adult. All subjects having low
antisocial behavior have not had any contacts with the
police and have not committed any crimes.
All subjects demonstrating high antisocial behavior
were selected from the largest "opportunity school" for
females in the Los Angeles County school district. An
opportunity school is a special facility whose target popu
lation is defined to include pupils who are: (a) habitu
ally truant, (b) irregular in attendance, (c) insubordinate,
(d) disorderly, and who have demonstrated poor adjustment
to alternatives available in and provided by the larger
comprehensive schools. The specific eligibility require
ments for attendance at an opportunity school identifies
pupils having: (a) poor adjustment to alternative options
provided within the home school, (b) poor adjustment to
Opportunity Transfer alternative options provided in the
new environment(s), (c) behavior and/or circumstances
requiring the pupil's immediate removal from the school of
attendance. The criterion of one or more police contacts
for all subjects having high antisocial behavior was met by
the fact of their attendance at an opportunity school,
since, the definition of the target pupil population of
such a facility would necessitate pupils having had previ
ous police contact in regard to their truancy, lack of
attendance and/or insubordinate or disorderly behavior.
14
Dependent Variable
Social egocentrism. The dependent attribute
variable "social egocentrism" ascertained by use of the
Dramatic Acting Test. A description of this instrument
along with procedures for establishing its reliability and
construct validity are discussed in the section on instru
mentation .
Research Hypotheses
The following research hypotheses are presented
with reference to a population of Mexican American girls.
Hypothesis 1
The proposition that there is a relationship
between antisocial behavior and the presence of persistent
social egocentrism suggests the following main effect
research hypothesis:
Girls having high antisocial behavior will score
higher on a measure of social egocentrism, than girls
having low antisocial behavior.
Hypothesis 2
The proposition that there is a relationship
between father absence and the development of antisocial
behavior in daughters, produces the following main effect
hypothesis:
15
Girls from father absent homes will score higher on
X
a measure of social egocentrism than girls from intact
families.
Hypothesis 3
The proposition that the impact of father absence
will be greater for girls having high antisocial behavior
than for girls having low antisocial behavior suggests the
following interaction research hypothesis:
The difference between social egocentrism scores
for girls from intact and father absent homes will be
greater for girls having high antisocial behavior than for
girls having low antisocial behavior.
Assumptions
1. It is assumed, through random assignment, that
scholastic differences among the subjects did not influence
the degree of social egocentrism, as measured by the
Dramatic Acting Test.
2. It is assumed, through random assignment, that
there were no differences between groups based on number, ^
sex, or age of siblings living in the homes of the subjects.
Delimitations
This study was limited to adolescent Mexican
American girls.
16
CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
Research related to delinquency and father absence
in adolescent Mexican Americans, and the literature on the
development of social egocentrism and its relation to anti
social behavior provides a rationale for selecting these
contingency variables.
Literature Providing Theoretical and Empirical
Support for the Relationship Between
(Persistent) Social Egocentrism and
Antisocial Behavior
Egocentrism is a central concept in the cognitive
developmental psychology of Jean Piaget (Inhelder & Piaget,
1958; Piaget, 1950, 1962). The essential meaning of ego
centrism is "embeddedness in one's own point of view"
(Looft, 1972, p. 74). Piaget (1962) emphasized that a
major portion of an individual's energy in development is
spent in the process of overcoming his egocentric reference
system, and has suggested egocentric thought processes as
the basis for problems of communication in human affairs.
Looft has integrated this concept into the developmental
framework of his life span psychology and proposed that
egocentrism is present in different forms throughout the
17
life cycle.
There has been some support for this differential
theory of egocentrism. According to Piaget (1928, 1950),
egocentrism characterizes the young child's functioning in
all phases of his life, and these early forms of ego
centrism represent fairly stable states.
Childhood egocentrism assumes different forms as
the child progresses to higher forms of cognitive maturity.
Inhelder and Piaget (1958) have delineated three types of
egocentrism that occur during the sensimotor, preopera-
tional, and concrete operational stages. A primary mani
festation of children's egocentrism is found in their
language behavior. "Egocentric speech" is speech that:
"Whether uttered in solitude or in the presence of others,
is judged to lack a primary communicative aim" (Looft,
1972, p. 77). Piaget (1926) stressed that while a child's
egocentric speech reflects a lack of cognitive skill, it
more fundamentally reflects a lack of "social will" to
communicate. "Socialized speech" applies to utterances
that do seem to reflect a genuine communicative aim.
Piaget further postulated that extensive social
interaction (especially with peers) is necessary to replace
egocentric speech with socialized speech. An extensive
program of research on role taking and communication skills
in children has been conducted by Flavell and his associ
ates (Flavell, 1966; Flavell, Botkin, Fry, Wright, & Jarvis,
18
1968; Fry, 1966, 1969). This research has systematically
confirmed and extended Piaget's studies of social communi
cation in children. Most of these studies involve some
variation of a basic procedure in which different aged
children are presented with tasks requiring an ability to
shift perspectives. The principal finding was an indica
tion that young children when speaking, confuse their own
perspective with that of the other person in a communica
tion situation. This confusion was found to decline
regularly with age.
In addition to tasks used by Flavell et al. (1968),
ingenious experimental procedures have been devised by
other experimenters to study the egocentrism/role playing
issue. A procedure developed by Cowan (1966) obtained
measures of egocentrism for each child on a task adapted
from Piaget's "three mountain problem"; subjects were then
paired on a social interaction task in which only oral cues
were allowed in order to achieve a common goal. From this
task, Cowan obtained measures of communication efficiency
strategies, and egocentric language. The performance of
nonegocentric pairs was found to be far superior to that of
egocentric or mixed pairs. Cowan concluded that egocentric
language is a useful concept in relating the structural
properties of the individual and the formal properties of
his interaction.
19
A recent study on the development of role taking
skills in young children presented tasks in a role taking
hierarchy to male and female subjects between the ages of
3 and 5 (Urberg & Docherty, 19 76). The hypothesis that the
tasks would form a hierarchy such that the skills needed
for the early tasks are logically prerequisite to those
needed for a later task was supported.
In a related earlier study, an experiment based on
Asch's social influence technique and Piaget's studies of
cognitive development explored the perspective skills of
160 (5-8 year old) children (Weinheimer, 1972). Egocentric
children were shown to have inadequate social schmata to
understand the adult meaning of conformity and independence.
Although the manifest behavior appeared the same in adults
and in children, the acts of conformity and independence
are mediated differently. It also showed that children
reconcile perspectives more frequently in the presence of
peers, rather than with adults, and that egocentric boys
conform less than girls.
The ability to conceptualize one's own thought, as
well as the thought of others, develops with age, but it is
these processes which form the basis of adolescent ego
centrism. This egocentrism emerges, according to Elkind
(1967) because while the adolescent can "cognize" the
thought of others, he fails to differentiate between the
objects toward which the thoughts of others are directed
20
and those which form the basis of his own concerns:
It is well known that the young adolescent . . .
is primarily concerned with himself . . . since
he fails to differentiate between what others are
thinking about and his own mental preoccupations,
he assumes that other people are as obsessed with
his behavior and appearance as he is with himself.
It is this belief . . . that constitutes the ego
centrism of the adolescent. (Elkind, 1967, pp.
1029-1030)
Elkind has proposed two concepts to describe the unique
form adolescent egocentrism may take. The adolescents'
"imaginary audience" accounts for his self consciousness,
and his "personal fable" stems from his belief in the
uniqueness of his own experiences. These two constructs
help account for certain forms of adolescent behavior and
experience.
At each stage of mental development, egocentrism
takes a different form and is manifested in a characteris
tic set of behaviors. The transition from one form of
egocentrism to another takes place in a developmental
fashion such that earlier forms of psychological function
ing are prerequisite to the next stage.
Although developmental phenomena are inevitable and
irreversible, egocentrism is a construct that has not been
widely studied in adolescents. One reason for this might
be related to the controversy as to whether adolescents are
capable of formal operational thinking. While Piaget con
sidered this a logical outgrowth of the concrete operational
stage, there is some recent evidence which questions this
21
assumption. Dulit (19 75) in a series of formal stage
experiments found that:
Formal stage thinking appears to be a kind of
"cognitive maturity." It integrates all that
has gone before. It is far from being commonplace
among adolescents or adults . . . Like most other
aspects of psychological maturity, it is a
potentiality only partially attained by most and
fully attained by some. (p. 556)
The results of an earlier study lend support to the
idea that formal operational thought is found infrequently
in adolescents (Higgins-Trenk & Gaite, 19 71). However,
Higgins-Trenk and Gaite propose from their research that
the egocentrism of adolescents may, in fact, account for
this absence of formal operational thought. Other related
studies have linked persistent egocentrism in adolescents
to impairments in creative thinking (Trzebinski, 19 74) and
social perception (Labouvie & Baltes, 19 73), while a large
number of studies have focused on the relationship between
egocentrism and various forms of social deviancy (Anthony,
1959; Chandler, 1972; Feffer, 1970; Glough, 1948; Martin,
1968; Sarbin, 1954; Thompson, 1968).
Chandler (19 73) demonstrated the relationship
between persistent social egocentrism and antisocial
behavior for preadolescent boys. Chandler measured and
attempted to remediate deficits in role taking skills of 45
chronically delinquent males, aged 11-13. After document
ing significant differences in role taking between the
delinquent subjects and a group of 45 nondelinquents, the
22
delinquent subjects were assigned to one of three treatment
conditions: (a) an experimental program which employed
drama and the making of video films as a vehicle for pro
viding remedial training in role taking, (b) a placebo
condition, and (c) a nontreatment control condition.
Subjects were administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary
Test and another measure of social egocentrism.
Preintervention and postintervention comparisons
indicate that only subjects in the experimental group
improved significantly in their role taking ability. An
18-month follow up study showed these improvements to be
associated with significant reductions in delinquent
behavior. The results of this study support three general
conclusions concerning the role of social egocentrism in
antisocial behavior. First, in contrast to the nondelin
quent group, the delinquent group tested, demonstrated a
"marked developmental lag" in their ability to successfully
adopt the roles or perspective of others. Second, inter- |
vention efforts focusing on training in role taking skills, j
significantly reduced the high level of social egocentrism
which had previously characterized the delinquent subjects.
Finally, these observed changes in role taking skills were
associated with a measurable reduction in the amount of
reported delinquent behavior among the experimental group.
It is recognized that demonstrating a relationship
between persistent social egocentrism and antisocial
23
behavior does not, in itself, provide a sufficient base for
inferring a causal relationship between these variables.
However, the results to this study do suggest the useful
ness of attempting to understand delinquent individuals in
terms of their developmental processes and their acquisition
of certain cognitive skills necessary for social inter
action .
Gluck (19 72) tested the same relationship with
adult sociopaths but failed to find a significant corre
lation between egocentrism and sociopathy. The subjects
were 105 inmates at a state prison and included 35 primary
sociopaths, 35 neurotic sociopaths, and 35 controls. Three
major hypotheses were presented: It was predicted that
sociopaths as compared to controls, would exhibit greater
exploitativeness, less capacity to delay gratification, and
higher risk taking behavior. While hypotheses two and
three were supported, predictions concerning exploitative
ness were not substantiated. There were no significant
differences between the three groups on any of the measures
for exploitativeness.
The results for the exploitativeness/egocentrism
measure did not allow for easy interpretation because of a
weakness in the experimental design. However, these find
ings were taken to indicate that there is not a strong
association between egocentricity and sociopathy. While
there is a distinction between adolescent delinquent
24
behavior and sociopathy in adults, the results of' the
studies mentioned previously must be interpreted with
caution.
Intrinsic to the egocentrism construct is the
phenomenon of "centration." This process refers to the
child's tendency to center his attention on one detail of
an object or event. Piaget (1950) has placed a strong
emphasis on the child's inability to shift his attention
from only one aspect of an object or event to another.
Within the Piagetian system, the disequilibrium involved
in social exchange is a necessary condition for centration.
Elkind (1967) and Looft (1972) have specifically
discussed adolescent egocentrism and the role of decenter
ing skills in diminishing its effect. Gelcer (19 77)
evaluated the development of social decentration in
emotionally disturbed institutionalized children. The sub
jects were 30 children, 8-15 years old, of normal intelli
gence, who were inpatients in a residential treatment
facility. The subjects were randomly divided into experi
mental and control groups and were pretested and posttested
on a role taking test and an observer rating scale for
social adjustment. All subjects demonstrated highly
maladjusted behaviors, but more so in the residential unit
than in the school. While/ all subjects were initially
found to have a high degree of social egocentrism, only the
experimental group participated in treatment sessions of
25
social decentration training.
The effect of training was evident in that all
experimental subjects significantly improved their social
decentering skills as compared to the controls, and more
than half of the experimental group reached the performance
level found in "normal" adolescents and adults. Further
more, following intervention, the experimental group's
maladjustive behavior in school dropped significantly as
compared to the controls in the same setting.
These findings corroborated the general clinical
observations that emotionally disturbed individuals
demonstrate both behavioral problems as well as faulty
thinking about themselves and others. The results further
serve to emphasize the importance of thought processes for
personal and social adjustment.
Cognitive decentration, argued Piaget (1962), is
the basis of adjustive thinking. Persistent egocentrism in
children and adolescents, has been linked to developmental
delays in the acquisition of moral judgment. Stuart (1967)
focused on the importance of decentration as a factor in
cognitive development. Both moral and causal judgment
abilities were studied in relation to the capacity for
decentration. Stuart reasoned that if decentration is a
necessary condition for the acquisition of mature judgment,
then all children capable of mature moral and causal judg
ments should also be capable of decentration. It was
26
hypothesized that decentration would account for signifi
cant differences in moral judgment, with the age variable
controlled. The moral and causal judgments of 120 children,
aged 8-14, were shown to correlate significantly with the
ability to decenter.
Decentration and moral judgment were shown, in turn,
to correlate with age and intelligence. It was suggested
that older, more intelligent children develop the capacity
to decenter more readily than do younger children. However,
it is possible that training in decentration may aid
individual development toward cognitive maturity and
morality.
Lawrence Kohlberg (1969) has argued that moral
development reflects a sequence of successive changes in
role taking and that this ability to take the perspective
of another person is of special significance during the
preadolescent period. This is the period during which the
emergence of conventional morality becomes apparent.
It is important to note that Kohlberg does not view
the relationship between role taking and the stage of moral
maturity as a contingent relationship, but rather as a
logical association defined in terms of the stage descrip
tions of moral judgment. Moral development may then be
characterized as a gradual evolution of role taking ability.
A study reported by Moir (19 74) further examined
the strength of relationships between nonmoral and moral
27
facets of role taking behavior. In this study, scores of
11-year-old girls on Kohlberg1s Moral Judgment Interview
were correlated with scores on nonmoral role taking tests
devised by Flavell, Selman, and Rothenberg respectively. A
major hypothesis predicting an association between nonmoral
and moral role taking measures was confirmed. An examina
tion of individual score profiles dispelled the proposal of
a clear break between preconventional and conventional
thought. Although the sample could not be divided into two
dichotomous groups, the sample as a whole was transitional
between the two levels of morality. It would seem from
these results that the emergence of conventional morality
is not an "all or none" condition, but rather occurs in a
series of smaller transitional stages.
The studies previously reported can only be inter
preted in an approximate fashion, and the discussion thus
far, has avoided the question of causality. While further
steps must be taken to complete the theoretical understand
ing, it is maintained that this cannot be reduced simply
to asking whether role taking ability causes or precedes
more mature moral responses, a conceptual mistake evident
in previous studies.
It is possible however to move back the question
of causality, and ask for the determining factor of role
taking development. This question has received some
attention in relation to moral development by Holstein
28
(19 6 8). The problem of what specific causal factors
determine the development of role taking behaviors requires
considerably more attention than it has so far received.
Whether the specific training of role taking skills is
possible and what effect this has on moral development,
diminishing egocentrism, and maladaptive behavior are
questions for future research.
The preceding section has attempted to identify the
relationship between persistent egocentrism and maladaptive,
antisocial behavior. Although this relationship cannot be
unequivocally defined, it is assumed that there is a
reasonable premise for further investigation of this topic.
While most of the research has been done on males, adults,
or children of mixed gender, little or no research has been
reported with adolescent girls or any ethnic minority.
The next section of this discussion will examine
antisocial female behavior and its relation to early father
separation; the results indicate that while the character
of female delinquency is changing, the causes may still be
linked to a lack of a satisfactory father-daughter relation
ship .
Literature Regarding the Effect of Father
Absence on the Development of Antisocial
Behavior in Female Adolescents
Delinquency represents a problem of prime social
importance in our country and strongly suggests the
______________________________________________________________29
necessity for understanding and preventing the development
of future antisocial offenses and behavior. Among those
juveniles convicted in court, there are about five times as
many boys as girls, and those offenses committed by girls
have been overtly different, until recently.
Research efforts devoted to the origins and char
acteristics of female delinquents have been sparse compared
to those of male offenders. Traditionally, criminal
offenses of female delinquents included promiscuity,
incorrigibility, truancy, running away, thievery, and overt
aggressive acts. However, a recent study by Thompson and
Lozes (1976) indicated that this trend might be changing.
These authors studied adolescent female gang members during
an 8-year-period and found that: "There is a steady and
significant increase in female contribution to typically
male offenses between 19 6 4 and 19 74" (p. 2). Thompson and
Lozes went on to state that:
Not only is there now evidence of a female form of
delinquency which was previously thought to be
entirely male, but the court statistics reveal an
overall lessening of the differences between males
and females in the frequency and type of charges.
While the number of charges increased dramatically
during the period from 19 6 7 to 19 74, females are
accounting for a greater percentage of these charges.
While there has been no general trend in the number
of violent or traditionally male charges over the
years, the females have consistently accounted for
a greater percentage of these charges. (p. 5)
Thompson and Lozes explain their innovative find
ings with the rather traditional theory of sex role
30
socialization. The previous character of female delin
quency was largely sexual and thought to be related to:
. . . close but restricting relationships with
their parents which often led to hostility and
affectional deprivation . . . according to the
theory, affectional gratification could be obtained
through sex delinquency. (Thompson & Lozes, 19 76,
p. 1)
With the recent move towards equality in sex roles and sex
role socialization, Thompson and Lozes conclude that: "It
is reasonable to expect increasing similarity between male
and female behavior, even delinquent behavior" (p. 5).
Although male adolescent delinquency has been
studied in great detail, not much research has been
directed to the delinquent adolescent female, to document
changes in their characteristic style of response. In
light of the changing nature of female delinquent behavior,
research is needed on the cognitive factors specific to
this phenomenon.
Miller, Zumoff, and Stephens (19 74) did a study on
reasoning and the development of moral judgment in female
delinquents. Their sample consisted of equal numbers of
delinquent, retarded, and normal adolescents, aged 13-16,
who were tested on six reasoning and four moral judgment
tasks. The results indicated that while the delinquents
showed delays in their cognitive development, they demon
strated no gaps in their ability to formulate moral judg
ments. Specifically, the delinquents* reasoning was
31
similar to that of the retardates, but they functioned at
the same level of moral judgment as the normal group. It
can only be concluded by these findings that their degree
of moral judgment was obviously not related to their own
moral conduct. These findings further suggest that the
subjects' delinquent acts may be related to a deficiency in
reasoning ability, rather than to faulty concepts of moral
behavior. However, it should be noted that the process
Piaget holds responsible for the development of morality is
the same process that produces rationality and because of
this, a theoretical tie exists between reasoning and moral
judgment.
Other related studies on female delinquency have
focused on the personality correlates of this group.
Singleton (19 76) investigated four general areas of the
antisocial adolescent female personality structure: (a)
self feelings, (b) psychological differentiation, (c)
fantasy capacity, and (d) parental identification. The
results indicated that the delinquent females had a greater
than average fantasy capacity, but were less psychologi
cally differentiated than average. They also were found to
have distorted self-perceptions and few, if any, of the
girls identified with either parent. No firm conclusions
could be drawn however, because of the exploratory nature
of this study.
32
In a related investigation, Purcell (1961) explored
the hypothesis that attitudes of depreciation and lack of
self-esteem characterize the self-concept of the delinquent
adolescent girl. The study involved a comparison of 100
delinquent girls with an equal number of control subjects
on four instruments which provided measures of the way in
which an individual perceives and values herself. On all
but the stability index, the controls obtained a signifi
cantly higher mean score, indicating a higher self-concept
level. For the stability index, the mean difference was in
the direction opposite to that predicted. The delinquents
showed less change in self-concept than the controls, who
thereby evidenced greater flexibility. The data of the
present investigation support the general hypothesis that
delinquent girls manifest poorer self-concepts than non
delinquent controls. In addition, there is the possibility
that self-concept might become a unifying concept in female
delinquency, if other research supports this relationship.
An investigation by Kopp (1960) found a relation
ship between anomia (i.e., normlessness, physical or
psychological isolation, and anxiety) and delinquency in
adolescent girls. When pretested on two pilot study
samples of delinquent and nondelinquent girls, the mean
scores for the two groups on a measure of anomie were
significant at the 1 and 5 percent confidence levels for
either measured categories. This appeared to support the
33
hypothesis that delinquents differed from nondelinquents in
variables related to the "anomic syndrome." This study was
primarily an exploratory study and due to its tenuous
nature, conclusions were not drawn by Kopp.
Expectancy is a construct of social learning theory
whose anticipatory function has been related to the pre
diction of behavior. Previous research has related delin
quent behavior to a combination of high reward value of a
goal with low expectancy of achievement (by legitimate
means). Black and Blankenship (19 71) did a study to test
the utility of social learning theory in predicting the
type of delinquent behavior, sexual or nonsexual, in which
adolescent girls would engage. It was hypothesized the
(a) sexually delinquent girls would place a high reward
value on love and affection and have a low expectancy for
attaining it, (b) nonsexually oriented delinquents would
place high reward value for recognition and status and have
a low expectancy of attainment, and (c) normals would not
be significantly low on reward value or expectancy for
either love and affection or recognition status. Hypotheses
one and three were supported, while hypothesis two appeared
to have little relevance for any of the three groups.
The results suggest that social learning theory may
be of some utility in predicting female delinquent behavior
with the indication that the variables of love and affec
tion are more useful than recognition and status in
34
understanding the motivations for delinquent behavior.
While these findings are not conclusive, they merit further
research, particularly on the effect of familial variables
on female delinquency.
In general, research findings on delinquency reveal
a greater instability of the family structure for children
who get into trouble with the law. Even in families where
the marriage is legally intact, delinquency is often the
result of poor communication and lack of discipline pro
cedures between the parent and child.
McTamney (19 76) investigated the dimensions of
parental communication and styles of discipline in order to
assess their impact on delinquency and certain character
traits in males and females. Four different testing
instruments were used to assess the types of communication
and discipline used in the families, and obtain measures of
autonomy and socialization for each child. These tests
were administered to equal numbers of males and females
between the ages of 14 and 17; the delinquent subjects were
all members of a correctional institution. The first two
hypotheses were concerned with communication and delin
quency. It was hypothesized that supportive and defensive
communication, as well as confusion in communication, would
be related to delinquency. These hypotheses were sustained.
The relationship between discipline and delinquency was
investigated in the third and fourth hypotheses. It was
35
predicted that the style of parental discipline would not
be related to delinquent behavior. However, when discipline
is looked at in conjunction with supportive communication,
it was predicted that discipline would be related signifi
cantly to delinquency. Both of these predictions were
supported.
The latter part of this study was concerned with
character traits of autonomy, socialization, and empathy
and their relationship to communication, discipline, and
delinquency. For females, there was a significant
relationship between socialization and supportive communi
cation on the part of both parents; no relation was found
between discipline and character traits. Consequently,
where the child perceives the parent as failing to give
support and/or acting in a defensive and confusing manner,
the probability of delinquency is greatly increased. In
the same context, it should be recognized that all intact
homes are not necessarily good homes merely because of the
presence of two parents.
In Western culture there seems to be a general
acceptance of the notion that the fullest social and per
sonal development of the child requires an intact family.
The belief in the desirability of the intactness of the
family is so pervasive that often marriages are held
together even though the violent marital tension and
discord may be detrimental to the child's welfare. While
36
there are some who recommend that it might be better for
children if families in bitter conflict were socially
dissolved, empirical data support the picture of the harm
ful effects of the broken home on the child's development.
A study conducted by the White House Conference of
19 34 emphasized the significance of the home for the per
sonality development of the child and the damage resulting
from the broken home. The broken home has been shown to be
a factor in many aspects of child development, especially
in relation to the dependent variable of antisocial
behavior (Glueck & Glueck, 1950; Monahan, 1960).
The investigations of the Gluecks produced perti
nent information on broken homes by age of the child. Not
only was the proportion of broken homes found to be higher
among the delinquents than among the controls (50 percent
versus 2 9 percent), but the break in the home also occurred
earlier for delinquent children. The Gluecks also found an
interval of time between the first "misbehavior" and the
child's first arrest or appearance in court. The mean age
of the delinquents in the control group at the time of their
first misbehavior was 8.4 years, and their first court
appearance was at 12.4 years, a difference of 4 years. The
Glueck study further demonstrates that at the time of a
court appearance, many children of a specified age have a
broken home history of several years, and a preceding record
of offenses.
37
Monahan (19 60) studied the effects of broken homes
by age on the development of delinquency in children. He
examined court and census records prior to 1960 for various
age groups and found that the homes of many delinquent
children are broken long before they reach the official
ages of delinquency. In fact, in the sample studied, over
half of all the children under 18 years of age, who came
from broken homes, were less than 7 years of age and about
70 percent of these children were under the age of 10.
However, numerous defects exist in the design of this
study, which suggests caution in interpreting the results.
It should be noted that the control group probably con
tained delinquents in it to an unknown degree; there was
selectivity in police referrals of children to court, with
many cases being informally adjusted by the police; the
delinquent group included more serious cases than prevailed
in the population as a whole, and did not control for the
habitual versus the first time offender. Considering the
biased nature of this data, the results should be viewed
with great reservations.
In order to fairly assess the independent variable
of family intactness and its relation to antisocial
behavior, the differential effects of type of family
separation need to be understood. Obviously, the loss of a
parent does not occur under the same set of circumstances
and at the same time for all children, even in the same
38
family. The nature of the family separation and the cir
cumstances surrounding the break are quite important in
understanding the consequences to the child.
Tuckman and Regan (1966) investigated the differ
ential relationship of various types of broken homes on the
personal and social adjustment of an outpatient clinic
sample of children. The children were classified by the
type of referral problem according to 12 categories of
behavioral disturbance. Six types of homes were identified:
(a) intact homes, (b) separated, (c) divorced, (d) widowed,
(e) unmarried, and (f) other. The last category included
broken homes where the status was not clear and/or cases of
desertion.
There were several major findings from this study;
the one most relevant to this discussion is that the
"broken" home should not be considered as a unitary concept.
The empirical data suggest that for significant referral
problems, the widowed home was most like the intact home.
This result is not surprising since death usually does not
occur under the same circumstances as other types of family
breaks. In the separated and the divorced homes, where
there is greater reason for assuming disintegration of
family relationships, the data showed a greater deviation
from the intact homes with respect to the types of referral
problems. Even then, there were important differences:
for some problems, the separated and the divorced were more
39
alike; for other problems, the separated were more like the
intact and widowed homes, and the divorced were more like
the unmarried homes.
While this evidence suggested that the broken home
should not be treated as a unitary concept, the differential
effects of the type of broken home were not able to be
ascertained in the present study. Therefore, this lack of
differentiation became a delimitation of the study.
Tuckman and Regan (1966) noted that the over-"
representation of broken (versus intact homes) in the clinic
sample did suggest to them that any type of broken home has
harmful consequences for the child's personal and social
adjustment. While this investigation was prevented from
determining the specific reason for the broken home of the
subject, all girls from separated homes lived with the
mother and did not have a biological father in the house
hold.
Father absence describes a particular type of
broken home situation and is an independent variable whose
relation to antisocial behavior has been well documented.
An incidental finding of a study by Marshall (19 73) indi
cated that nondelinquents were more susceptible to attach
ment to an 1 1 antigroup1 1 because of their lack of a father.
Other studies have documented the effect of father
absence on the educational achievement of children. In two
related studies, Sciara (1975) and Sciara and Janz (1974),
40
achievement test scores in math and reading for two groups
of black urban children from intact and father absent homes
were analyzed. The findings revealed significant differ
ences favoring the academic achievement of boys and girls
from father present homes in the two test areas.
Carlsmith (196 4) compared the specific personality
characteristics of boys whose fathers were absent during
World War II with boys whose fathers were not absent. It
was concluded that although father absence in the early
years does have a powerful and long range effect on later
development, these effects apparently do not interfere with
acquisition of a positive self-concept nor with overall
emotional stability for successful students in academic
environments.
It should be noted that Carlsmith's sample was
drawn from a select group of white, middle class males, who
at the time of this study were either college or high
school students. The college sample consisted of Harvard
freshmen, while the high school sample included senior class
boys from the local area high schools. In addition, the
period of father separation was temporary and viewed with
the considerable social sanction of serving one's country.
Undoubtedly, the selectivity of this sample limits the
generalizability of the findings to minority and/or delin
quent populations.
41
A longitudinal study done by Zold (19 75) explored
the effects of father absence during childhood on later
adjustment. Zold's investigation was a follow up in adult
hood of 80 white, father-absent (FA) subjects seen at a
university medical center for psychiatric reasons in
adolescence, and two groups of father-present (FP) subjects
used for comparison purposes. One group of FP subjects
were matched (FPM) on variables of age, socioeconomic
status (SES), residence, birth date, and sex; the other
group was randomly selected (FPR) from a population of
adolescents seen at the clinic. The subjects were evenly
divided as to gender.
The results of this investigation do not support
the bulk of previous findings on father absence. Very few
statistically significant results emerge between FA and FP
subjects on 50 dependent variables classified under head
ings of heterosexual adjustment, antisocial behaviors,
achievement related activities, and psychiatric status.
The findings on variables related to heterosexual adjust
ment were mixed as far as better or worse adjustment of FA
as opposed to FP subjects, while differences between the
two groups on achievement related variables appear only on
very selected variables. Significant results on items
relating to antisocial behavior center mainly on symptoms
and psychiatric diagnoses assigned by professionals, and FA
subjects did worse than FP subjects on these particular
42
measures. FA subjects also appear to function on a lower
level on items subsumed under the heading "psychiatric
status." The greater incidence and greater length of
institutionalization among the FA than among the FP sub
jects is one of the few unusually strong findings related
to a comparison of FA and FP subjects.
In general, the findings indicated that early FA
males (loss of father prior to age 5) adapt less satis
factorily than do late FA males and early FA females; the
presence or absence of a surrogate father figure was
immaterial to the adjustment level of the FA subjects.
These latter findings are relevant to the present discus
sion, since FA subjects of this study were not controlled
for presence of a surrogate father and experienced early
father absence. While these factors become further limita
tions of the present study, certain considerations are
necessary to interpret Zold's research.
Although Zold's findings are mixed in their support
of previous studies, the applicability of the results was
limited by certain weaknesses in the experimental design.
The subject population used by Zold was different from most
studies due to (a) the exclusion of the confounding vari
able of mother absence, (b) the fact that all subjects had
been seen for psychiatric reasons in adolescence, and (c)
the inclusion of two types of control groups. In addition,
the bulk of significant differences found relate to
43
variables most closely connected to professional.judgment
such as, number of agency contacts, ratings of adaptive
behaviors, etc.; the amount of agreement between profes
sional diagnoses was not known, and there was insufficient
indication given of the agreement among professionals or
of the standardized criterion used for making these profes
sional appraisals. Finally, the generalizability of Zold's
sample was limited to people with psychiatric diagnoses.
Despite these shortcomings, the size and scope of this
study defined it as a work of major importance on the topic
of father absence.
Hunt and Hunt (19 75) studied a nondelinquent popu
lation of black and white males to examine the effect of
father absence on personal identity and orientation toward
conventional success goals. A sample of white and black
adolescents from junior and senior high schools (N = 44)
were used. The variables included: (a) father absence,
(b) social class, (c) orientation towards conventional
achievement, and (d) personal identity. The findings .
showed different effects within the two status groups;
among the white males, the dimension of family structure
had marked consequences, with the father absent boys being
characterized by more withdrawal from goals of conventional
success and adult respectability. For the black males,
however, father absence did not have a significant effect
on their orientation toward conventional achievement; the
44
findings showed that father absence conversely had a
slightly positive effect on black males. This pattern of
costs for white males and gains for black males indicates
that father absence may have a differential effect for
different racial and/or ethnic groups, among nondelinquent
males.
The child-parent relationship has been found to be
important in the child*s adjustment and relevant to under
standing the behavior of delinquent adolescents. Previous
research relating to the general concept of "juvenile
delinquency1 1 has indicated the importance of understanding
this relationship in the context of father absence.
Although male adolescent delinquency has been
studied in great detail, not much research has been
directed to the delinquent adolescent female. There is
much evidence to support the notion that family dynamics
may be even more important in the female offender than in
the male offender.
Monahan (1960) reported a set of data on broken
homes relating to children who were arrested and charged
with committing delinquent acts in Philadelphia from 1949
to 1954. His analysis of this data revealed that illegiti
mate parentage and socially broken homes are considerably
more common among female offenders (both black and white)
than among boys. When one realizes, in connection with
this result, that there are about as many boys as there are
45
girls who come from socially broken homes, then father
absence among girl offenders (especially the younger girls)
becomes a rather large factor in female delinquency.
Empirical data supporting the view that father
absence can influence the girl's personality development
has come from research by Sears, Pintler, and Sears (19 46) .
Sears and his associates found that father absence was
"associated with greater aggression, especially self-
aggression" (p. 240). These writers went on to speculate
that such aggressive behavior may be a function of the
father absent girls' conflict with their mothers.
Heckel (1963) reported frequent school maladjust
ment, excessive sexual interest, and social acting out
behavior in five fatherless preadolescent girls. He
postulated that such behavior may be a manifestation of a
variety of symptoms of intense frustration, stemming from
unsuccessful attempts to find some adult male figure with
whom they can form a meaningful relationship.
While the role of the father has been emphasized
in this review, it is recognized that a fuller understand
ing of the influences on female delinquency will be
achieved only from an analysis of the interaction of a
variety of familial, sociocultural, and constitutional
factors. There is a great need for further systematic
research to examine the interactive influences on the
development of female delinquent behavior.
46
Literature Relating to the Effect of Father
Absence on the Development of Antisocial
Behavior in Mexican American Adolescents
There is undoubtably much to learn about the
effects of father absence on female delinquent behavior by
the analysis of different sociocultural patterns. The
Mexican Americans represent an ethnic group for whom family
structure is an influential behavioral determinant.
LeCorgne and Laosa (19 76) investigated the effects
of father absence on 248 Mexican American elementary
students. Drawings of the human figure (one male and one
female) were obtained from each child following the pro
cedures of the Goodenough-Harris drawing test. The children
were also administered the Bender-Gestalt Test and were
rated on a scale of personal adjustment by their classroom
teacher. Results show that the father present children
were significantly higher than the father absent group on
measures of social adjustment and sex role differentiation,
except on the scale of teacher perception. Whereas
teachers found father present males and females to be
fairly well adjusted, father absent children were found to
show significantly more signs of social maladjustment.
The importance of male strength and dominance
manifests itself in the primarily patriarchal orientation
of the Mexican American family. Although there is some
evidence that this may be changing with increased accultur
ation (Brody, 19 66; Derbyshire, 1969) , the importance of
47
the father is still a relevant factor for the present
generation of Mexican Americans. Theoretical and empirical
data presented in the previous section, supported the con
clusion of a positive relationship between father absence
and female delinquent behavior.
The importance of the role of the father in Mexican
American families should have a similar, strong relation
ship to antisocial behavior in Mexican American girls. The
distinction of being both Mexican American and female poses
a dual problem in that both are minorities excluded from
the mainstream of American culture and each lacks adequate
access to economic, social, and political power. In
addition, the adolescent identity crisis, stimulated by the
adolescent’s desire to identify with family and peers, and
the dominant culture's concurrent rejection, suggests that
adolescence for Mexican American females is vulnerable to
deviant behavior (Derbyshire, 1969).
This finding is reinforced by Seward (1964) who
studied the effects of cultural conflict on Mexican
American youth. He found that acculturation of Mexican
Americans "had a disorganizing influence on family struc
ture and adversely affected the personalities of the family
members, often resulting in antagonism . . . and becoming
manifest in delinquent behavior" (p. 97).
Derbyshire (1969) further studied the values,
attitudes and behavioral patterns of adolescents born in
48
Mexico (or first generation) as being significantly differ
ent from adolescents whose families have resided in the
United States for at least two generations. The sample
consisted of 89 adolescents of Mexican American background
who lived in a low income area of East Los Angeles. Derby
shire indicated that delinquent adolescents in East Los
Angeles are most frequently youth with extreme feelings of
uncertainity toward Mexican culture. The major finding was
that migrant Mexican American adolescents in search of self
and adaptively meaningful behavior, utilize father,
religion, and Mexican culture as positive value orienta
tions; nonmigrant adolescents adhere to culturally negative
value orientations as representative of a comparative
reference group.
This switch from a positive value oriented
reference group to a negative value oriented reference
group has significant behavioral implications. For Mexican
American adolescents, adaptive behavior learned at the
onset of migration becomes maladaptive during succeeding
steps in the migratory process. If adolescents, their
families, or society's institutions cannot provide adaptive
techniques for rapid change during several generations of
the migratory process, then the ghettos of East Los Angeles,
with their social disorganization, will be perpetuated.
Children born to the migrant Mexican and reared in
East Los Angeles present unique adaptation patterns.
49
Conflicts due to diversity of cultures create adaptive
problems with American institutional life in areas of
values, education, religion, and occupation. Stumphauzer,
Aiken, and Veloz (19 77) completed a behavioral analysis of
juvenile crime in the East Los Angeles area. Their assess
ment of the situation stated that:
Los Angeles is typical of many major cities in that
not only is there a high rate of juvenile crime, but
there is a severe youth gang problem as well. It
has been estimated that there are 200 such gangs in
Los Angeles with about 100 of them being Chicano,
reflecting the large Mexican/American population in
Southern California. Many of them are violent gangs
in which territorality and gang violence have
become a daily way of life . . . (p. 76)
Stumphauzer and his associates identified the
existence of a female gang in the area which was abolished
by male gang members. Although they identified a sub
section of approximately 150 females, ranging in age from
12 to 18, little is known about the extent or type of
female delinquency in the East Los Angeles area.
The present study identified a sample of 40 delin
quent Mexican American girls from intact and father absent
families in East Los Angeles. All of these girls had been
convicted of one or more offenses considered to be of
felony status. This study was one of the first systematic
efforts to correlate father absence with antisocial
behavior in Mexican American females. The lack of research
in this area presented unique considerations for testing
and sampling procedures with this group of subjects. The
50
special problems resulting from the lack of established
research procedures will be considered in the section on
research methodology.
Literature Providing Support for the Selection
of the Dramatic Acting Test as a Measure
of Social Egocentrism
The theoretical notions concerning egocentrism,
social decentration, and related concepts have generated a
modest number of empirical measurement instruments. The
categorical names under which these research efforts fall
include studies of empathic ability, role taking skills,
and verbal communication effectiveness, to name a few.
An early review of the literature on role taking
skills by Sarbin (1954) attempted to identify the essential
components of interpersonal behavior phenomena. In
accordance with Piaget and others, Sarbin concluded that
the essential element in any skill sequence involved in
role playing, seems to be a process by which an individual
apprehends certain attributes of another individual.
Studies investigating various aspects of the
egocentrism/role taking issue have utilized various
measurement techniques to assess this characteristic.
Chandler (19 73) did a definitive study on the relationship
between egocentrism and antisocial behavior in preadolescent
boys. The measure of social egocentrism employed by
Chandler was based on an assessment procedure originally
introduced by Flavell, Botkin, Fry, Wright, and Jarvis
(1968).
The original procedure of Flavell et al. consisted
of a cartoon sequence which the subjects were asked to
describe from their own point of view and then from the
perspective of a coexperimenter, who was shown only an
abbreviated version of the same stimulus material. In this
way, Flavell et al. were able to put their subjects in
possession of highly privileged information, which was
unavailable to the bystander, whose position they had to
occupy. The assessment procedure employed by Chandler
closely paralleled that of Flavell and his associates, and
differed only in the identity of the partially informed
bystander, whose point of view the subjects were asked to
assume. Whereas, Flavell et al. had employed a coexperi
menter for this purpose, the Chandler study incorporated
the bystander role as a cartoon character within the
stimulus material.
A similar procedure was employed in Feffer's (1959)
Role Taking Task test (RTT), which was used by Gelcer
(19 77) to measure social decentration (the lack of ego
centrism) in emotionally disturbed institutionalized
children. The RTT which was designed to relate Piaget's
decentration concept to the interpersonal domain, requires
the child to make up stories for a number of ambiguous
scenes depicting social situations. Each scene is
__________________________ L2_
presented again, and the child is asked to retell the
original story from the viewpoint of each of his characters.
Evaluation is based on the degree to which he is able to
refocus upon his initial story from the perspectives of
each of his characters, while maintaining continuity among
the various versions.
Although reliability and validity measures have
been established independently for each of these two
instruments, both tests were normed on a white, middle
class population. In a pilot study, each of these instru
ments was tested on a group similar to the sample popula
tion. Both tests were regarded as inappropriate to the
Mexican American population in terms of the scenes depicted
on the story cards.
The pilot sample of Mexican American adolescent
girls did not find the scenes typical of situations in their
lives, and this discrepancy biased the use of these
particular instruments. In addition, the procedure of
having the subjects retell the same story repeatedly from a
different point of view was inappropriate with the sample
population, who lost interest after the initial retelling.
An alternate measure of egocentrism is the Dramatic
Acting Test, developed by Bowers and London (1965). This
instrument is a measure of empathical skill which the
authors feel is essential to the development of a social
perspective; the test was developed as a measure of
53
egocentrism for children. The investigator describes an
interpersonal situation to the subjects, and assigns roles
to himself and the subjects, providing standardized lines
for himself, while the child invents his own responses. A
modified version of this test was developed and especially
adapted for use with the Mexican American population in a
separate pilot study. Modifications of the measure were
minor and involved changing words of description or explan
ation to phrases more appropriate to the Mexican American
vocabulary. The administration procedure followed the
format of the original Bowers and London test.
Reliability and validity measures for the Dramatic
Acting Test, have been established by the authors in two
previous articles (Bowers & London, 1965; Madsen & London,
1966). However, due to the modifications involved, new
measures of reliability and validity will be established
for this instrument. No other published evaluations or use
of this instrument were found in the literature. However,
in a recent pilot with adolescent Mexican American girls,
the subjects were able to relate the roles to situations in
their own lives and communicate their understanding in a
spontaneous manner.
It was believed that this modified instrument was
most appropriate, since the vocabulary and role situations
showed the least bias toward the specific population.
Based on the pilot study data, the modified version of the
54
Dramatic Acting Test was assumed to be an appropriate
instrument for the assessment of social egocentrism in
Mexican American adolescent girls.
CHAPTER III
METHODOLOGY
This chapter deals with methodologica.1 background
and procedures involved in this study. The chapter is
organized around (a) the sample selection, fb) instrumenta
tion, (c) data collection procedures, (d) statistical
analysis, and (e) limitations of the study.
Selection of the Sample
Subjects for this field experiment were from the
unincorporated area of East Los Angeles. This area lies
east of Boyle Heights, south of City Terrace and Alhambra,
west of Monterey Park and north of Commerce and Montebello.
Those census tracts in East Los Angeles which supply the
greatest amounts (in Los Angeles County) of family dis
organization, juvenile delinquency, crime, drug addiction,
dilapidated housing, poverty, and other indicators of com
munity pathology are surrounded by four major freeways:
the Long Beach Freeway on the east, Santa Ana Freeway on
the south, San Bernardino Freeway on the north, and Golden
State Freeway on the west. Apparently these freeways tend
to limit ecologic mobility and act as "curtains" segregating
56
the "most economically deprived Mexican Americans"
(Derbyshire, 1969, pp. 75-80).
The subjects consisted of 80 Mexican American girls,
aged 13-17 (X = 14.98; SD = 1.41), who attended school in
the Los Angeles Unified School District. All subjects were
from the unincorporated area of East Los Angeles, and were t/'
identified by the zip code of their home address, 9 002 6,
as coming from the same residential area. Census data
provided in the school records indicated that all subjects
lived in households where the average annual income was
between $4,000 to $6,000.
The 40 subjects demonstrating high antisocial
behavior were randomly chosen from the largest opportunity
school for females in the Los Angeles Unified School
District. The population of this facility was derived on a
referral basis from the six area high schools. A local
*
high school was randomly chosen from among the six area
high schools for the control population of low antisocial
girls.
The larger population of high antisocial girls was
further classified according to the two types of family
structure (father absence or intact) and random samples of
20 in each of those two categories were selected.
The population of low antisocial girls was also
subdivided into intact and father absent groups and random
samples of 20 girls in each of those categories were
57
selected. The number of subjects placed in each cell is
illustrated in Figure 1.
Family Structure
Intact Father Absent
Antisocial
High nH = 20 n12 = 20
Behavior
Low
n21 = 20 n22 = 20
Figure 1. Number of subjects in each experimental cell
The level of antisocial behavior for each subject
was determined by their placement in either an opportunity
school or regular high school. In addition, the names of
all 80 subjects were run through Central Juvenile Index,
Criminal Identification Investigation, and Federal Bureau
of Investigation files to validate their status as high or
low antisocial, according to the operational definitions of
these variables.
The type of family situation for each subject was
determined by mailing release forms for family information
to each subject's family and by conducting home interviews
for subjects whose parents failed to return the forms.
Restrictions imposed by the Los Angeles Unified School
District prevented having a separate intelligence quotient
(IQ) score for each subject. However, the general IQ
58
ranges (80-115) for the subjects, provided by each of the
two schools, were equivalent.
Instrumentation
Dependent Variable
Social egocentrism. The Dramatic Acting Test is a
measure of empathical skill, which the authors (Bowers &
London, 1965) feel is essential to the development of social
perspective. A subject who exhibits satisfactory role
adaptation, demonstrates his ability to successfully take
another person*s perspective, and consequently, shows a
lack of egocentrism.
This instrument was developed by Bowers and London
as a measure of egocentrism. There are six roles for the
subject and the examiner to act out together. The examiner
describes each interpersonal situation to the subject, and
assigns roles to himself and the subject, providing
standardized lines for himself, while the subject invents
his own responses. The six subject roles consist of: (a)
"friend" (the examiner plays a friend who has lost some
money); (b) "enemy" (the examiner is a younger child who
desires to play ball with the subject's team); (c) "mother"
(the examiner plays a child who has broken a lamp); (d)
"father" (the examiner is a child whose principal has com
plained to the father regarding school behavior and low
grades); (e) "teacher" (the examiner is a whining
59
tattletale who complains about the behavior of a classmate);
and (f) "sheriff" (the examiner plays an outlaw).
The content of the subject’s lines is rated on a
4-point scale, reflecting different degrees of role adapta
tion, in terms of role playing ability and/or the main
tenance of a logical response sequence. The four categories
of responses that are used to score the Dramatic Acting
Test are: (a) satisfactory response sequence and/or good
role adoption, score 1; (b) moderately logical response
sequence and/or moderately good role adoption, score 2; (c)
illogical response sequence and/or inadequate role
adoption, score 3; (d) no role adoption, score 4. See
Appendix A for examples of scored sample responses.
Only the content of what the subject actually says
is scored. A "line" is defined as: "the unit or response
behavior which the subject performs between any two examiner
lines or subsequent to the final examiner line in each
playlet" (Bowers & London, 1965, p. 11). In each of the
six playlets the total number of subject lines is three.
Each subject line receives a numerical score, corresponding
to the appropriate scoring category.. The total range of
subject scores for any one playlet line is from 1 to 4,
such that 1 indicates the minimum amount and 4 indicates
the maximum amount of egocentrism. The total test score
for a single playlet is the average test score per line:
60
Total Score per _ Sum of scores for all subject lines
playlet Number of subject lines in the play
The total test score per subject is the average of
the six playlets, which ranged from 1 to 4; a score of 4
can be interpreted as no role adoption, while a score of 1
reflects maximum role adoption. Administration time was
15 minutes.
Bowers and London (1965) report interscorer product
moment correlations between .80 and .87 for a sample of 40
children, aged 5, 7, 9, and 11. The original version of
the Dramatic Acting Test is shown in Appendix A.
In the present study, a modified version of the
test was developed and especially adapted for use with the
Mexican American population. Modifications of the measure
were minor and involved changing words of description or
exclamation to phrases more appropriate to the Mexican
American vocabulary. The modified version followed the
format of the original test and maintained all other admin
istrative aspects of the Bowers and London instrument: the
setting, the preliminary instructions, the general instruc
tions and the sequence, number, and type of roles used.
The modified version of this instrument was included in
Appendix B. Verbatim recording of the subjects' responses
was recommended by Bowers and London and the subjects'
responses were taped to control for cultural and SES bias,
based on presumed reading and writing skills. A standard
61
tape recorder was used to tape the responses for rater
evaluation.
Separate reliability and construct validity measures
were provided for the modified version of the Dramatic
Acting Test. Appropriate statistical procedures were used
to establish the interscorer reliability of the instrument.
The scores for all 80 subjects on each playlet were rated
by three independent scorers. Interrater reliability was
established among the three raters.
Calculation of Reliability
In establishing the reliability and construct
validity of the Dramatic Acting Test, Bowers and London
presented the rational for their scoring procedure. Their
argument for construct validity stated that the general
principle governing the assignment of scores on the
Dramatic Acting Test is that:
There exists a sufficiency of cultural stereo
types associated with the roles . . . that such
role playing ability may be treated as the
accurate representation of the content and
response sequence . . . associated with those
stereotypes. (Bowers & London, 1965, p. 10)
The plausibility of this principle permits the a priori
assignment of line sequences to the examiner even though
he cannot know precisely what responses the subject will
make to the first lines of the script. The same reasoning
makes it possible to classify responses into a small number
of categories and to assign weighted values to responses
62
falling within particular categories. In concluding their
argument for the reliability and construct validity of
their instrument, Bowers and London state that:
The considerable agreement among independent
judges as to the scores to be assigned and the
tendency for performance to be positively
related to age respectively testify to the reli
ability and validity of these procedures. (p. 10)
The weakness of this reasoning is recognized, with respect
to the premise that the scoring must be appropriate, if
there is agreement among the judges.
Essentially, a different rationale is inherent in
the assumption that egocentrism is the inability to take
another person*s perspective and is negatively related to
role playing ability. If you can successfully perform the
roles, you can take another person's perspective, thus,
demonstrating a lack of egocentrism. These arguments are
elaborated in further detail in the review of the litera
ture on egocentrism.
Table 1 shows the Pearson Product Moment Correlation
Coefficients of all three raters for all 80 subjects on
each of the six playlets and for the total (composite) ego
centrism score of each subject over all six playlets. The
correlation coefficients are all relatively high from .76
to .96, and are significant at the .01 level.
An observed pattern among the coefficients was that
raters two and three each correlated higher with rater one
than with each other. Closer examination revealed that
Table 1
Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficients
for Interrater Reliability
i I _______________________; ______________________
Raters
Playlet 1 & 2 1 & 3 2 & 3
1 .88 . 88 .76
2 .89 .89 .77
3 .89 .89 .80
4 .91 .86 .76
5 .90 .91 .82
6 .94 .90 .85
Composite Score .96 .94 .89
Note. All correlation coefficients achieved
significance at p < .01.
aN = 80.
64
rater two tended to rate lower than rater one, while rater
three tended to rate higher. Consequently, it was
determined that an average of the three raters' scores
would give the most accurate measure for the subsequent
analysis of data.
Procedures for Data Collection
Prior to beginning data collection, the investigator
served as a volunteer staff member at the target opportunity
school. During a 5 month period, the investigator ran five
role playing groups on a weekly basis which were composed
of the girls who had been preselected for participation in
the study. This procedure was employed to maximize these
subjects' familiarity with the investigator and role
playing activities. This exposure was felt to be essential
to the subsequent cooperation of the high antisocial sub
jects in the data collection process.
The test administration was carried out in each
school between May 25, 19 77 and August 12, 19 77; the sub
jects in the opportunity school were tested first with a
2 week interval before beginning testing of the low anti
social group. One week prior to the test administration at
each school, the subjects attended a general meeting. In
this initial session, the investigator was introduced as a
student from the University of Southern California. The
subjects were told that they had been selected to be in a
65
role playing exercise; it was explained that the exercise
was short and that they be allowed to leave class to
participate. The subjects were told that the exercise was
to be taped and conducted on an individual basis, in
private. The speaker stressed the anonymity of the
responses, and that each subject would be identified by a
number known only to the investigator. In concluding the
session, the speaker stated that the exercise would be fun,
and thanked them all for coming.
Test administration at each school lasted approxi
mately 3 weeks and three subjects were tested each day.
Both schools had alternating morning and afternoon sessions
and the examiner obtained each subject from their second
period class, 20 minutes prior to the end of the period.
The testing room at each school was a vacant and secluded
classroom. The examiner and subject sat opposite each
other in school desks, with the examiner desk holding the
test materials, and the tape recorder. Subjects were per
mitted to sit, stand, or otherwise act out their parts or
not as they chose. Most subjects remained seated through
out the session. The test administration time was
approximately 15 minutes.
The preliminary instructions informed the subjects
that they were going to act in a series of short plays, and
that they should respond to the examiner lines, playing
each part as they thought that character would act. For
66
! each playlet, the examiner described the parts to be played
i
by himself and the subject and said the first line of the
I
; script. See Appendix A for the specific wording of the
■preliminary instructions. At the end of the test, the sub-
: ject was allowed to listen to herself on tape for 5 minutes
1 Three raters (including the examiner) made inde-
I
pendent ratings of each subject's responses for the six
I
'playlets from the session tape recordings. The subject's
.responses were rated separately on a scale from 1 to 4, 1
|indicated the best role adoption and/or a satisfactory
response sequence, and 4 indicated no role adoption. A
'subject's total score per playlet was obtained by use of
*
|the formula (see the scoring procedure of the instrumenta-
i
\
j tion section) and a composite egocentrism score was
iobtained for each subject by summing the six playlet scores
All three raters were doctoral students in the Department
of Educational Psychology at the University of Southern
California. The scorers were trained in a series of four
jtraining meetings (approximately 2 hours each) using pilot
i
study data to learn the rating techniques.
Procedures for Statistical
Analysis of Data
Selection procedures have produced groups that were
as equivalent as possible on a majority of variables. One
variable of particular interest that was feared might
67
confound the study was the age of the subjects. Although
all the subjects ranged in age from 13 to 17, it was not
known if age was distributed equally among the cells.
Since increasing age is negatively correlated with the
degree of egocentrism (Elkind, 196 7; Looft, 1972), age was
considered to be a probable confounding variable. In order
to rule out the influence of age, the age in years of each
of the 80 subjects was calculated from their birth dates.
Then, initially, a 2 x 2 ANOVA was performed using family
structure and antisocial behavior as the independent
variables and age as the dependent variables to either
establish equivalence or establish the need to use age as
a covariate.
The formal hypotheses were tested in a 2 x 2
research design in which family structure and antisocial
behavior were the independent variables and the degree of
egocentrism was the dependent variable. The statistical
plan was to use a 2 x 2 fixed effects ANOVA if it was
established that there were no significant differences
among the age variable, or, if there were, to use a 2 x 2
fixed effects ANOVA with age as a covariate.
Significant interaction was to be followed up by a
Newman Keuls multiple comparison test to find the source of
that significance (Kirk, 1968, pp. 91-93).
All significant F tests were to be followed up by
2
an Omega Squared (u) ) strength of association test, to
68
determine the amount of dependent variable variance that
can be attributed to the independent variables (Hays, 196 3,
p. 407).
Limitations
The research on father absence indicates that there
may be a differential effect on the behavior of daughters
due to the type of father absence (Biller & Weiss, 19 70;
Hetherington, 19 72). While it would have been useful to
distinguish among the different types of father absence for
each subject, restrictions imposed by the Los Angeles
Unified School District prevented questioning either the
subject or their family for that information. Therefore,
the family situation of the subject was only referred to as
being intact or having father absence in this study.
Father absent subjects may also have had the
influence of unrelated males in the household who could
serve as surrogate fathers. The existence or extent of
such substitute male influences could not be ascertained
from information on the family information forms or in the
school records.
There is the additional possibility that lack of
complete randomization procedures produced differences
among the subjects that were not accounted for in the
design of the study. Such differences could have resulted
from naturally occurring variables (IQ, birth order, etc.)
69
that the present investigation could not control, but that
were potential confounding variables. Future studies need
to probe out other ways in which natural differences among
the population could influence prolonged egocentrism and
develop designs to control for these effects.
70
CHAPTER IV
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Analysis and interpretation of the data is pre
sented in this chapter. The statistical outcomes that are
the focus of the study include the results of (a) the
analysis of variance with age as the dependent variable,
(b) a presentation of the overall analysis of variance,
(c) inclusion of supplementary statistical procedures, such
as the Newman Kuels and Omega Squared, and (d) a discussion
of the specific relations posed by the research hypotheses
in Chapter I.
Analysis of Findings
Preliminary Analysis of the Distri
bution of Ages by Family Structure
and the Level of Antisocial Behavior
A 2 x 2 fixed effects analysis of variance was per
formed using age as the dependent variable. In the event
that either main or interaction effects were found, age
would have been used as a covariate to control for its
unwanted influence in the final analysis of the data.
The mean ages of all 80 subjects are presented in
Table 2. The statistical analysis of those means (analysis
Table 2
Mean Age in Years for All Subjects
Antisocial Behavior
>
Family Structure
Intact Father
Absent
Row Mean
High 15 .00a 14.85a 14.92
Low 15.25a H
•
00
O
15.02
Column Me an 15.13 14.82 14.9 7b
an = 20.
bGrand mean.
of variance) is presented in Table 3.
The mean ages presented in Table 2, are relatively
close in each of the four cells. The 2 x 2 analysis of
variance (Table 3) revealed that there were no significant
main effects or interactions due to the age variable.
Therefore, all four groups of subjects were equivalent with
respect to age, and age was not a confounding variable in
this study.
Examination of the Two-Factor
Analysis of Variance
The main effects and interaction hypotheses of this
study were tested by means of a 2 x 2 fixed effects
analysis of variance. The mean egocentrism scores for all
the subjects and the results of that test can be seen in
Tables 4 and 5.
The values in Table 5 are restated for the purposes
of this discussion along with the results of the strength
of association (Newman Kuels) and multiple comparison
(Omega,Squared) procedures used to investigate the three
research hypotheses.
Hypothesis 1
Girls having high antisocial behavior will score
higher on a measure of social egocentrism, than girls
having low antisocial behavior. The main effect for the
value of antisocial behavior, as reported in Table 5,
73
Two-Factor Analysis
Table
of Variance
3
Testing the Effect of Age
Sources of Variation
Sum of
Squares DF
Mean
Square F Significance
Antisocial Behavior 0.200 1 0.200 0.099 NS
Family Structure 1.800 1 1.800 0.891 NS
Antisocial Behavior
by Family Structure 0.450 1 0.450 0.223 NS
Residual 153.499 76 2.020
- -
Total 155.949 79 - - -
Note. NS = nonsignificant p > .05.
Table 4
Mean Egocentrism Scores for All Subjects
Antisocial Behavior
Family Structure
Intact Father
Absent
Row Mean
High 2 . 72a 3.6 3a 3.18
Low 2.15a 1. 84a 2.00
Column Mean 2.43 2.74 2 .59b
Note. The maximum score possible is 4.00.
an = 20.
b„ - ■
Grand mean.
75
Table 5
i
Two-Factor Analysis of Variance Testing the Amount of Egocentrism
Sources of Variation
Sum of
Squares Df
Mean
Square F Significance
Antisocial Behavior 27.874 1 27.874 43.342
*
Family Structure 1.867 1 1.867 2.903 NS
Antisocial Behavior
by Family Structure 7.469 1 7.469 11.614
*
Residual 48.878 76 0.643 - -
Total 86.088 79
- - -
Note. NS = nonsignificant p > .05.
r
CT\
confirms hypothesis 1 and was found to be statistically
significant: F(l,60) = 43.34, £ < .01. That is, girls
with high antisocial behavior showed significantly higher
egocentrism scores than did girls with low antisocial
behavior (i.e., 3.18 > 2.00) . Subsequent analysis using
omega squared strength of association tests indicate that
the amount of dependent variable variance explained by the
significant antisocial main effect was 34.4 percent.
Hypothesis 2
Girls from father absent homes will score higher on
a measure of social egocentrism than girls from intact
families. As can be seen in Table 5, contrary to
hypothesis 2, the main effect for the type of family struc
ture was not significant: F(l,60) = 2.90, p > .05.
Apparently, the type of family structure alone does not
significantly effect the subjects' level of egocentrism.
Hypothesis 3
The difference between social egocentrism scores
for girls from intact and father absent homes will be
greater for girls having high antisocial behavior than for
girls having low antisocial behavior. Confirming hypothesis
3, an interaction effect between antisocial behavior and
family structure was statistically significant: F(l,60) =
11.61, £ < .01. Having found a significant interaction, a
Newman Kuels multiple comparison procedure was performed
1 2 -
to determine the source of that interaction. The Newman
Kuels test revealed that the interaction effect is caused
by the fact that there exists no significant difference
between father absent or intact subjects for girls having
low antisocial behavior, but there is a significant differ
ence for girls having high antisocial behavior (i.e.,
2.72 < 3.6 3). Subsequent analysis using the Omega Squared
strength of association test indicated that the amount of
dependent variable variance explained by the significant
interaction effect was 7.9 percent.
Discussion
Antisocial Behavior
The level of antisocial behavior had a powerful
effect accounting for 31.4 percent of the variance of this
study. There was a strong significant difference between
the mean egocentrism scores of the high antisocial group
versus the low antisocial group.
A possible explanation for this finding is supported
in the work of Chandler (19 73) who demonstrated the initial
relationship between antisocial behavior and persistent
social egocentrism in delinquent boys. The strength of the
effect of antisocial behavior accounted for a significant
amount of the variance in this study and confirmed
Chandler's finding for a population of Mexican American
adolescent girls.
78
The present research findings do not imply that
the persistent social egocentrism demonstrated by these
subjects is in any way unique to persons whose adaptational
failures are of the antisocial type. In addition, the
finding of a strong association between egocentrism and
antisocial behavior is a correlation and does not suggest a
directional relationship between these two variables. \
Despite these qualifications, the result of this study does
suggest the utility of trying to understand delinquent
(antisocial) youth in terms of the failure to adopt more
!
advanced cognitive operations. In other words, egocentrism '
j
would seem to impair successful human interactions. j
Future researchers should consider the possibility j
that additional cognitive variables might be related to /
antisocial behavior.
Family Structure
Hypothesis 2 was concerned with the main effect of
the type of family structure and was not supported. While
this result is contrary to the reasoning behind the
hypothesis, several factors may account for the lack of a
significant finding.
The literature supported the hypothesized relation
ships between antisocial behavior and egocentrism, and with
father absence for different populations. Despite the lack
of specific research studies, it was reasonable to
79
postulate a possible relationship between father absence
and egocentrism in this particular group of subjects. Due
to the importance of the role of the father in the Mexican
American family, it was reasoned that if adolescent girls
in the high antisocial group showed significantly more ego
centrism than low antisocial girls, father absence might
also be a contributing variable. The failure to find a
significant effect for family structure could be due to a
number of factors.
Tuckman and Regan (196 6) investigated the effects
of various types of broken homes and concluded that the
broken home should not be treated as a unitary concept.
There were differential relationships in the various types
of broken homes (e.g., separation, divorce, desertion, etc.)
which could not be considered as a consistent influence.
Studies by Hetherington (19 72) and Biller and Weiss (1970)
further confirm the differential effect on the behavior of
daughters, resulting from the particular type of father
absence. Due to restriction imposed by the Los Angeles
Unified School District, the type of father absence for
these subjects could not be determined and consequently
became a limitation of the study. If differences among the
groups on the family structure variable did exist they may
have been masked by the lack of differentiation in the
father absent group.
80
An additional limitation of this study could be the
failure to control for the presence of unrelated males in
the homes of father absent subjects, who could act as sur
rogate fathers. Since the presence or effect of such
surrogates could not be ascertained, this factor could have
served to attenuate differences among groups.
A final possible explanation for the lack of a ;
significant main effect for family structure could be due
to the nature of the independent variables. The design of
this study uses self selecting independent variables such
as type of family structure and level of antisocial behavior.
Consequently, there may be a number of other variables
associated with these, that were not previously accounted
for, and whose presence may be suppressing the hypothesized
effect. Future researchers could ferret out these potential
confounding variables and utilize them in their design to
determine their influence. The present study was one of
the first systematic efforts to test and sample among a
population of Mexican American girls. The lack of research
in this area presents unique considerations which cannot
rule out the possibility that significance due to family
structure may be achieved in future studies.
Level of Antisocial Behavior and
the Type of Family Structure
Interaction was measured across two levels of anti
social behavior and for two types of family structure. It
81
was found that, overall, girls who were in high antisocial
groups had higher egocentrism scores, than girls in the low
antisocial groups. While there were no significant differ
ences for girls in the low antisocial groups, based on the
type of family structure, girls in the high antisocial
group who were from father absent homes had higher ego
centrism scores than high antisocial girls from intact
families.
In addition to differences between the high anti
social groups based on the type of family structure, both
of these groups were significantly different from the low
antisocial groups of girls with respect to the degree of
egocentrism. Significant interaction occurred between girls
in the low antisocial, intact family group and girls in the
high antisocial, father absent group which accounted for
7.9 percent of the variance.
The above findings support hypothesis 3.. They also
confirm, in part, Chandler's (19 73) finding of a relation
ship between egocentrism and antisocial behavior. While
the presence (or absence) of a father in the home did not
significantly effect the degree of egocentrism for low
antisocial girls, it was a significant factor for the high
antisocial group.
Although family structure was not important as a
main effect, it did become a significant factor in inter
action with the level of antisocial behavior. The finding
’ 82
that high antisocial girls from father absent families
showed the greatest amount of egocentrism, while low anti
social girls from intact families showed the least, may be
a function of the particular ethnic group studied. There
is the possibility that the significant interaction between
the variables of antisocial behavior and egocentrism was
influenced by the cultural importance of the father for the
Mexican American subjects. Further research is necessary on
the interactive influences for female delinquent behavior
for this population.
Implications of this research justify the importance
of early selection of children in trouble and the involve
ment of the individual in their own future goals and values.
This study emphasizes the problems of antisocial behavior
among the urban minority poor. In particular, it focuses
on a minority within a minority, the Mexican American
female, towards whom little social concern or attention has
been directed. These adolescent girls have been studied
a posteriori after their patterns of antisocial behavior
(or lack of) have been established and accounted for. This
research finding further implies that the antisocial
behavior of the Mexican American girl could be related to
her early family experiences, particularly the presence or
absence of a father in the home.
The individual, at any age, may be acting (or
reacting) according to unique personality patterns, rather
83
than to any common list of causal traits. The behavioral
patterns that an individual chooses vary according to thei
cultural and personal background, as well as current
situational variables. It is doubtful whether any single
factor can be found which would be sufficient to account
for persistent social egocentrism.
CHAPTER V
SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This chapter presents a summary of the problem,
methodology and findings of the present research study.
Recommendations for future investigations on the relation
ship among egocentrism, antisocial behavior, and family
structure are drawn from the analysis of the data.
Summary
Problem
The purpose of this study was to explore the
relationship between early father absence and the level of
antisocial behavior, and to determine its interactive
influence on the persistence of social egocentrism in a
sample of adolescent Mexican American girls.
In an attempt to identify relationships between the
independent and dependent variables, three research
hypotheses were proposed: (a) girls having high antisocial
behavior will score higher on a measure of social ego
centrism than girls having low antisocial behavior; (b)
girls from father absent homes will score higher on a
measure of social egocentrism than girls from intact
85
families; and (c) the difference between egocentrism scores
for girls from intact and father absent families will be
greater for girls having high antisocial behavior than for
girls having low antisocial behavior.
Methodology
The subjects consisted of 80 Mexican American girls,
aged 13-17, who attended school in the Los Angeles Unified
School District. All subjects were identified by the zip
code of their home address, as coming from the same
residential area. Census data provided in the school
records indicated that all subjects lived in households
where the average annual income was between $4,000 to
$6,000.
The level of antisocial behavior for each subject
was determined by their placement in either an opportunity
school or regular high school. The 40 subjects demon
strating high antisocial behavior were randomly chosen from
the largest opportunity school for females in the Los
Angeles Unified School District. A local high school was
randomly chosen from among the six area high schools for
the control population of low antisocial girls. In
addition, the names of all 80 subjects were run through
Central Juvenile Index, Criminal Identification Investiga
tion, and Federal Bureau of Investigation files to validate
their status as high or low antisocial.
86
The type of family situation was determined through
family information release forms which were administered to
each subject's family.
The study employed a 2 x 2 analysis of variance
design, which divided subjects into four groups (n = 20)
based on the level of antisocial behavior (high or low) and
the type of family structure (intact or father absent
families).
All subjects were tested with the Dramatic Acting
Test (Bowers & London, 19 65), a measure of role playing
ability designed to assess the dependent measure of ego
centrism. Responses were recorded and scored by three
independent raters. An average of these ratings was used
to determine the overall egocentrism score for each subject.
Summary of Findings
Findings based on the two main effects of the study
indicate that (a) girls having high antisocial behavior
demonstrated higher egocentrism scores than girls with low ^
antisocial behavior, and that (b) girls from intact families
were not significantly different from girls from father
absent families on a measure of egocentrism.
Findings derived from the interaction effect can be
generally interpreted to show that for girls with low anti
social behavior, the type of family structure did not
result in significant differences between their egocentrism
87
scores. For girls with high antisocial behavior, the type
of family did produce significant differences in a measure
of egocentrism.
Recommendations
The following recommendations are offered on the
basis of the findings presented above.
1. The literature has demonstrated that the broken
home cannot be considered a consistent influence on chil
dren based on the differences in the age of onset and
gender (Monahan, 19 60), in addition to differential effects
for the type of father absence (Biller & Weiss, 19 70;
Hetherington, 1972; Tuckman & Regan, 1966). Due to the
limitation of the present study, differences across the
family situations were not identified or differentiated for
the father absent group. It is recommended that future
related research attempt to ascertain and account for
differences based on diverse types of father absence.
2. An additional limitation of this study was the
inability to control for the presence of unrelated males in
the households of the father absent subjects. While neither
the presence nor influence of such males could be determined,
the effects of such contact could be that of having a
surrogate father in the home. This factor may have
influenced the present research findings, particularly the
nonsignificance of the main effect of family structure. It
88
is recommended that future research efforts consider the
possibility of an unrelated father substitute in the home,
when investigating the condition of paternal absence.
3. There is sufficient evidence in this study to
substantiate the existence of an antisocial subculture of
adolescent Mexican American girls. However, a greater
number of girls were identified in the same geographic
area, having no previous police contacts and not having
committed any crimes. Delinquency is recognized as a .major
concern within the East Los Angeles community and specifi
cally with the Mexican American inhabitants. It would be
helpful for future research efforts in this area to focus
on factors that differentiate the nondelinquent adolescent
subgroup within the same environment. While some prelimi
nary research has been devoted to nondelinquent males in
this community (Aiken, Stumphauzer, & Veloz, 1977), studies
on nondelinquent girls could help identify successful
channels and adaptations for coping with the delinquent
subculture.
4. This study has presented no conclusive evidence
of a directional relationship between the independent and
dependent variables. Only tentative associations have been
established which will hopefully stimulate further research.
This study indirectly suggests some ways in which family
structure and egocentrism tend to differentiate girls
having high and low antisocial behavior. However, antisocial
89
behavior-was not studied directly, nor did this study
establish a causal relationship between egocentrism and
antisocial behavior. Additional research, which would focus
entirely on a dependent variable of delinquency is recom
mended in an effort to differentiate delinquents from non
delinquents .
5. Existing delinquency prevention programs could
be supplemented in the educational system by early screen
ing for egocentrism in latency aged children. Children
identified as having a high degree of egocentrism could
then be assigned to remedial treatment, such as role
playing sessions, designed to reduce persistent egocentrism,
and allow for age appropriate cognitive and social develop
ment.
The present investigation has identified certain
limitations and confounding variables in the study of the
relationship among egocentrism, antisocial behavior, and
family structure. It is hoped that research stimulated by
this study will be of particular benefit to Mexican
American youth.
90
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98
APPENDIXES
APPENDIX A
THE DRAMATIC ACTING TEST: A ROLE
PLAYING TEST FOR CHILDREN
100
The Dramatic Acting Test: A Role
Playing Test for Children
Perry London Patricia Bowers
and
University of Southern California University of Illinois
The materials of this test were first used in an
experiment reported by Bowers and London in "Developmental
correlates of role playing ability." The test was designed
for children from kindergarten level through about age
twelve, and in its present form has been administered
successfully to almost one hundred children in this age
range.
No props are necessary to administer the test, but
verbatim recording of a child's responses is desirable. In
our laboratory, the test was always administered by one
experimenter while another, observing through a one-way
vision screen, simultaneously observed and scored the
performance. Tape recording of the test is a satisfactory
substitute for an observer, however, and permits independent
scoring at a later time to ascertain interscorer reliabil
ities. Bowers and London report such reliabilities as .80
and higher for judges to whom scoring manual and verbatim
transcripts were both available.
In our laboratory, the testing room was simply but
attractively furnished. The examiner and child sat opposite
each other in comfortable chairs with a small table at the
101
examiner's left hand holding the test materials. Children
were permitted either to sit or to stand, to gesticulate or
not, or otherwise to act out their parts or not as they
chose. Most children remained seated throughout the
session. The entire test administration requires less than
fifteen minutes.
Preliminary Instructions:
Today we're going to see how good an actor you can
be. You've seen television and heard radio plays, haven't
you? Well, you and I are going to act in a group of very
short plays. You're going to pretend you're someone else,
and act just like that person would, like they do on TV or
radio. The only difference is that you're going to make
up your own lines as we go along. O.K.? All you have to
do is pretend you really are the person I tell you and do
just what that person would do. Let's pretend we're doing
a radio show, all right? In fact, we're going to record it
and we can listen to it later. Would you like that? There
will be six little plays (and then just one more acting job
that I'll tell you about later).* Now, for each play I
Note. This investigation was supported by Public
Health Service Research Grant MH 0 859 8, from the National
Institute of Mental Health, Perry London, Principal
Investigator.
*In our experiments, the Dramatic Acting Test was
followed by a Hypnosis Simulation Test, adapted from Part
II of the Children's Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, London,
P., Palo Alto, Calif.: Consulting Psychol. Press, 1963.
102
will tell you who you are supposed to be and who I am
supposed to be, and I will say the first line of the play.
Then you make up a line, and so on, and we will keep the
play going for one minute. Understand? (Repeat if
necessary.)
103
ROLE PLAYING TEST
FRIEND
General Instructions to S:
We're good friends. We know each other from school
\
and live near each other. You play the part of my friend.
General Orientation of E:
Worried, answers factual questions of S, rejects
any solution S_ proposes to problem other than S_ finding
money: "Here it is!"
Experimenter Script
E line 1: Gosh, I'm really in
trouble.
E line 2: Remember when we
were playing ball
on the playground?
I lost ten dollars,
and I must have lost
it there.
*Come and help me
find it.
*Why not? What
kind of friend
are you?
E line 3: We've looked every
where around here
for fifteen minutes
and haven't found
it. I don't know
what to do.
b responses requiring cues
or modifications of lines
No help offered
Refusal of help
*Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter's statement.
104
ROLE PLAYING TEST
ENEMY
General Instructions to S_:
I'm a couple of years younger than you. You're a
bully and you don't like me at all.
General Orientation of E:
Denies or refuses to accept S^'s not allowing him to
play, or makes mistakes if he plays and blames them on S.
Experimenter Script
E line 1: Could I play ball
with you?
Alt. 1. *0h please, I can
play real good.
2. *(gesture of missing
ball) You threw
that ball too high 1
3. *Gosh, I'm tired.
Let's play something
else.
E line 2: Why?
I don't want to go.
Please let me play.
But I like to play
with you.
S responses requiring cues
or modifications of lines
Perhaps, I don't know.
Continues to allow him
to play.
Note. For material in above parenthesis, experi
menter should use lines which are most appropriate and
continue one minute.
*Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter's statement.
105
ROLE PLAYING TEST
MOTHER
General Instructions to S:
You're my mother. It's during the afternoon and
I've been playing with my friend (Jim or Sally) in the
living room. You play the part of my mother.
General Orientation of E:
Half-scared and defensive
Experimenter Script
E line 1
E line 2
E line 3:
Gee, Mom, we were
just playing and
the lamp broke.
It wasn't our fault.
We were throwing the
ball to each other
and something
happened to make it
go wrong, and it
hit the lamp. It
was just an accident
*It isn't fair to get
punishment when it
was just an accident
It never happened
when we played here
before.
S responses requiring cues
or modifications of lines
S gives punishment
*Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter 's statement.
106
S responses requiring cues
or modifications of lines
ROLE PLAYING TEST
FATHER
General Instructions to S:
You're my father. I'm just coming into the house,
but you have just gotten a call from my teacher telling you
that I don't pay attention in school and am getting bad
marks.
General Orientation of E:
Breezy, somewhat fresh.
Experimenter Script
E line 1: Hi, Dad. It's real
nice outside. Do
you want to come out
and play with us?
*Good. Who were you
talking to on the
phone?
*Why? That isn't
fair.
I pay attention.
Our teacher isn't any
good. It isn't my
fault I don't get
good marks. It's
hers. She doesn't
like me and is
always picking on
me.
E line 2
E line 3
Agrees to play
Punishes
*Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter's statement.
107
ROLE PLAYING TEST
TEACHER
General Instructions to S^:
You are my teacher. We're in class, and my name is
Sally. You are teaching an arithmetic lesson.
General Orientation of E:
Persistent, whines, unpleasant tattle-tale.
Experimenter Script
E line 1: Teacher, Joe just
took my pencil!
E line 2: Teacher, Joe pulled
my hair and it
hurts!
*Joe's laughing now.
He's hiding his
face behind his
book but he's laugh
ing because he's
gotten away with it
E line 3: He's not listening
to you, teacher.
He's hiding his
face behind his
book but he's
laughing.
S responses requiring cues
or modifications of lines
Has addressed himself
only to Sally
*Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter's statement.
108
ROLE PLAYING TEST
SHERIFF
General Instructions to S:
You're a sheriff in a town far out West about 100
years ago. I'm a robber who has just ridden into town with
my gang. It's like a cowboy TV story.
General Orientation of E:
Bold, bragging manner.
Experimenter Script S responses requiring cues
or modifications of lines
E line 1: Hey, youI Are you
the sheriff around
here? We won't be
needing you any more.
We're taking over
this town.
*My men are nearby.
You'd better
surrender and
leave town before
someone gets hurt.
Scared reaction:
"Please don't."
E line 2: So, you think you'll
be able to stop me?
My men are nearby.
You'd better
surrender and leave
town before someone
gets hurt.
**End of playlet.
Action responses
♦Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter's statement.
**E should let S win.
109
ROLE PLAYING TEST
SHERIFF (cont'd)
E line 3: ***
Yes, this will be a
nice place for my
office when you
leave.
If continues to
challenge.
E line 4: I dare you to do
anything to me.
***E will continue with line three if does not
end playlet~with response to E line 2.
110
Directions for Scoring
The general principle guiding the assignment of
scores on the Dramatic Acting Test is that there exist a
sufficiency of cultural stereotypes associated with the
roles demanded in this test such that role playing ability
may be treated as the accurate representation of the con
tents and response sequence most commonly associated with
those stereotypes. The plausibility of this principle
permits the a priori assignment of line sequences to the
experimenter even though he cannot know precisely what
response S will make to the first line of the script. The
same reasoning makes it possible to classify responses into
a small number of categories and to assign weighted values
to responses falling within particular categories. The con
siderable agreement among independent judges as to the
scores to be assigned and the tendency for performance to be
positively related to age respectively testify to the
reliability and validity of these procedures.
Four categories of response have been used to score
the Dramatic Acting Test, each representing a different
degree of efficiency at role playing in terms either of the
adoption of effective stereotype or the maintenance of a
plausible response sequence. Each "line" in the child's
performance receives a numerical score corresponding to one
or another category, and the total score for a single
111
playlet is the average score per line. In other words,
Total Score per playlet =
Sum of scores for all lines
No. of lines in playlet
Total test score is the sum of playlet scores. A "line" is
defined as the unit of response behavior which the child
performs between any two E lines or subsequent to the
final E line in each playlet, as indicated in the E Script
above. The length of such responses is quite variable, of
course, and scores must consequently be assigned on the
basis of the scorer’s best judgment as to the overall
adequacy of the "line" with respect to the available scor
ing categories.
The general characteristics of scoring categories
are
Category 4. No role adoption, i.e., behavior does
not correspond at all to the expected
cultural stereotype. Receives score
of 4.
Category 3. Response sequence is illogical and/or
role adoption is inadequate approxi
mation of stereotype. Receives score
of 3.
Category 2. Moderately logical response sequence
and/or moderately good adoption of
role. Score 2.
Category 1. Satisfactory response sequence and/or
112
good role adoption. Score 1.
The material which follows presents a Scoring
Manual for the Dramatic Acting Test, indicating the
expected stereotype for each role, the categories applic
able to different lines, and examples of response lines
which would receive particular scores.
Role 1: Friend
Friend stereotype in this
help.
situation: One who wishes to
Category Line Examples
4 1 & 2
alt.
No responses
Refuses aid
3 1,2,3 Sympathy "That's too bad."
2 1,2,3 Questioning
1 1,2,3, Offers help
Solves whole problem
Personal
refuse to
Category
Role 2: Enemy
Enemy stereotype in this situation: one who will
• please or to accede to the wishes of his enemy.
Line Examples
4 1, alt. #2
alt.
2
Acting like a friend
Yes, can play. Perhaps you
can play.
Here's a lower ball.
We can rest.
Reversal to a friend role:
"You can play a little."
3 1 & 2
alt.
alt. #3
Simple refusal to allow play,
e.g., NO.
Refusal with impersonal reason
given, "You're too little."
Minor criticism of missing
ball: Too little to catch it
right.
Refusal to stop playing.
2 1, alt. #2
alt. #1
Hostility shown:
rejection, "Go away."
Personal criticism of playing:
"Terrible player."
1 1, alt. #2 Purely personal attacks and
rejection, calling E "brat,"
"pest," "I don't like you."
Role 3: Mother
iMother stereotype in this situation: one who is concerned r
;with children's behavior as a possible cause of lamp break- j
■ing, and reference to this behavior from the point of view j
'of an adult authority rather than a sympathetic peer. ;
Category Line Examples
4 1 Reassures child
2 Forgives
Concern with lamp only
Reversal to forgiveness
without any explanation.
3 1 Concern with lamp only
(implies minimal adoption of
I mother role in the first line
because concern with children's1
breaking may be implicit. In j
subsequent lines it must be ;
made explicit). ;
1,2,3 Scold, punishes, forbids, j
reprimands without explana- i
tion, e.g., "Don't play here. i
Go to bed."
2,3 Repetition of previous lines
unelaborated.
Questions neutrally.
1 Questioning which implies
knowledge of how it
happened and/or irritation
with child.
2,3 Any explanations, e.g., "You
must be more careful not to
break good things." "You're i
I not allowed to play ball here
i
and you disobeyed. You can't
play here again."
Role 4: Father
Father stereotype in this situation: one with authority to
demand child's attention to the school problem which is of
concern to him.
Category Line
2 & 3
Examples
No mention of school. "Yes,
I'll play." Reference to
information which implies
question or concern.
Support of child, such as
"Don't worry." Previous
authoritarian attitude reversed
without explanation.
alt.
2 & 3
Immediate punishment or scold
ing. (Such action is illogi
cal in this line because no
basis for it has been laid; it
shows no incorporation of role
and situation.)
Ignoring the question asked.
Essential repetition of his
previous line (illogical
sequence).
1 & alt Explicit questioning with no
reference to having previous
information. (An important
part of the situation has been
omitted, a part which an
authority figure would be
expected to include, but
questioning is a logical
sequence.)
1 & a It
2 & 3
Reference to having informa
tion and questioning.
Explanation of any stand
taken, e.g., of punishment or
scolding. Support of teacher.
117
Role 5: Teacher
Teacher stereotype in this situation: one who has author
ity to attempt to enforce rules of fair play in this class.
Category Line Examples___
4 1 & 2 Reactions to Sally:
Unfriendly, "Take it back."
Friendly, "Here's another."
No reference to E line
(back to lesson)
3 Ignoring Sally's statement.
1 Reaction to Joe but without
any command to return, etc.
(e.g., That isn't nice).
2 & 3 Essential repetition of
previous lines, only substi
tuting different situations:
Stop pulling hair, stop
laughing after saying give
back pencil. (Logically, the
responses should reflect the
fact that bad acts are piling
up.)
3 Reaction only to Sally,
friendly or unfriendly.
Command "Give back pencil."
1 Command and explanations or
warning (disturbing class,
lessons, not nice, can have
own if need it).
2 & 3 Punishment, warning, persua
sion, explanations, taking
into account that it is
second or third offense.
Role 6: Sheriff
Sheriff stereotype in this
Category Line
situation: a brave man.
Examples
4 1
1,2,3
2,3
Scared reaction "Please don't."
No response
Scared reaction
3 1,2,3 Simple denial "No you aren't."
2 1,2,3
2,3
Challenges "Just try to."
Bragging "I'm faster than
you. "
Questions
Commands and warnings with
no explanations of strength
to enforce, etc.
1 1
1.2.3
1.2.3
Command to leave, warning.
Explanations of sheriff's
power.
Action
APPENDIX B
ROLE PLAYING TEST
ROLE PLAYING TEST
FRIEND
| General Instructions to S_z
We1 re good friends. We know each other from school
and live near each other. You play the part of my friend.
iGeneral Orientation of E:
Worried, answers factual questions of S, rejects
| any solution proposes to problem other than S_ finding
;money: "Here it is'."
'Experimenter Script
*E line 1: Name, I'm really
■ in trouble.
■E line 2: Remember when we
i were playing ball
‘ in the yard? I lost
! some money, and I
] must have lost it
4 there.
j *Come and help me
! find it.
1 *Why not? What
i kind of friend
| are you?
i
E line 3: We've looked every-
j where around here
; for fifteen minutes
] and haven't found
- it. I don't know
! what to do.
S responses requiring cues
or modifications of lines
No help offered
Refusal of help
Note. Appendix B represents my own role playing
testing.
*Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter's statement.
121
ROLE PLAYING TEST
ENEMY
General Instructions to S^:
I'm a couple of years younger than you. You're a
bully and you don't like me at all.
|General Orientation of E:
j Denies or refuses to accept S^'s not allowing him to
iplay, or makes mistakes if he plays and blames them on S.
!Experimenter Script
I 1
1E line 1: Could I play
j basketball with
j you?
I Alt. 1. *Oh please, I can
play real good.
2. * (gesture of missing
ball) You threw
that ball too high I
3. *Hey, I'm bored.
Let's play some
thing else.
E line 2: Why?
I don't want to go.
Please let me play.
But I like to play
with you.
S responses requiring cues
or modifications of lines
Perhaps, I don't know.
Continues to allow him
to play
Note. For material in above parenthesis, experi
menter should use lines which are most appropriate and
continue one minute.
*Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
|based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter's statement.
, ROLE PLAYING TEST
i
' MOTHER
i
General Instructions to S:
You're my mother. It's during the afternoon and
I've been playing with my friend (Jim or Sally) in the
:living room. You play the part of my mother.
:General Orientation of E:
i
Half-scared and defensive.
Experimenter Script
E line 1:
E line 2
E line 3
Mom, we were just
playing and the
lamp broke.
It wasn't our fault.
We were fooling
around with each
other and something
happened to make it
go wrong, and it
hit the lamp.
It was just an
accident.
*It isn't fair to
get punished when it
was just an accident.
It never happened
when we played here
before.
S responses requiring cues
or modifications of lines
S gives punishment
*Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter's statement.
ROLE PLAYING TEST
FATHER
i
| General Instructions to S_: j
i ' 1
; You're my father. I'm just coming into the house, !
I
I
jbut you have just gotten a call from my teacher telling you ;
, I
Jthat I'm getting into trouble in school and I might not
^ I
■pass.
:General Orientation of E:
i
i
Breezy, somewhat fresh.
t Experimenter Script
E line 1: Hi, Dad. It's real
; nice outside. Do
you want to come
; out and go to the
; store with us?
| *Good. Who were you
! talking to on the
phone?
■ *Why? That isn't
1 JZ '
i fair.
|E line 2: I pay attention.
!
IE line 3: Our teacher isn't any
j good. It isn't my
! fault I'm getting
! into trouble. It's
| hers. She doesn't
| like me and is
! always picking on
! me.
S responses requiring cues
or modifications of lines
Agrees to play
Punishes
^Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter's statement.
124
ROLE PLAYING TEST
TEACHER
.General Instructions to S: * .
^ You are my teacher. We're in class, and my name is
Sherry. You are teaching a math lesson.
General Orientation of E:
1 Persistent, whines, unpleasant tattle-tale
Experimenter Script
E line 1
E line 2
E line 3:
Miss, Sherry just
took my pencil!
Miss, Sherry pushed
me and I hurt
myself I
*She's laughing now.
She's hiding her
face behind her
book but she's
laughing because
she's gotten away
with it.
She's not listening
to you, Miss. She's
laughing. She's
hiding her face
behind her book but
she's laughing.
S responses requiring cues I
or modifications of lines
Has addressed himself
only to Sally
*Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter 's statement.
125
ROLE PLAYING TEST
SHERIFF
General Instructions to S_:
You're a sheriff in a town far out West about 100
years ago. I'm a robber who has just ridden into town with
my gang. It's like a cowboy TV story.
General Orientation of E
Bold, bragging manner.
Experimenter Script
E line 1
E line 2:
Hey, you! Are you
the sheriff around
here? We won't be
needing you any more
We're taking over
this town
*My men are nearby.
You'd better
surrender and leave
town before someone
gets hurt.
So, you think you'll
be able to stop me?
My men are nearby.
You'd better surren
der and leave town
before someone gets
hurt.
**End of playlet
S responses requiring cues
or modifications of lines
Scared reaction:
"Please don't."
Action responses
*Denotes lines which are substituted or deleted
based on the subject's response to the preceding experi
menter's statement.
**E should let S win.
ROLE PLAYING TEST
SHERIFF (cont'd)
E line 3: ***
Yes, this will be a
nice place for my
office when you
leave.
E line 4: I dare you to do
anything to me.
If continues to
challenge.
* * *E will continue with line three if S does not
end playlet with response to E line 2.
127

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Asset Metadata

Creator Castellano, Vianne Marie (author)

Core Title The effects of early father absence and the level of antisocial behavior on the development of social egocentrism in adolescent Mexican American girls

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Education

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Hispanic American studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,psychology, developmental,psychology, social

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c26-463915

Unique identifier UC11245128

Identifier usctheses-c26-463915 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier DP24260.pdf

Dmrecord 463915

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Castellano, Vianne Marie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA