Explaining drug use and delinquency by race and ethnicity: A test of differential association, social bonds and self-control

The research presents an explanatory model that integrates three particularly dominant criminological theoretical perspectives, differential association, social bond and self-control theories, to examine relationships between drug use and delinquency and race and ethnicity (which include non-Hispanic whites, blacks Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans) in the United States. The key hypotheses are that the causal processes leading to drug use and delinquent/criminal behavior, which are specified in the integrated model, are invariant across racial and ethnic groups.;By using the 2001 National Household Survey of Drug Abuse dataset, the study examines the integrated model and tests the causal processes across race and ethnicity, addressing the questions: do the theoretical constructs vary across racial and ethnic groups? Are the causal processes invariant across racial and ethnic groups? What are the variations in parameters across racial and ethnic groups? And what is the relative importance of differential association, social bonds, and self-control in explaining drug use and delinquency for different racial and ethnic groups.;The results support the integrated theoretical model and indicate that this integrated model could be applied for each racial and ethnic group. However, the overall causal mechanisms between background variables, social bonds, differential associations and self-control vary by race and ethnicity as well as age. The model explains the most variance in drug use for Whites, and the least for Asians. On the other hand, it explains the most variances of delinquent behavior for Asians among youths, but the least variances in criminal behavior for Asians among adults. The parameters of the causal linkages specified in the model vary between the racial and ethnic groups. The determinative process of differential associations, and self-control also vary significantly across race and ethnicity.