Relationship between Parenting Styles, Self- Efficacy and Attitude to Delinquency among High School Students

Although in most societies, delinquency is defined as a behavior that deserves punishment by law, but just to explain the concept, the pure legal perspective, is not enough. It would be better to survey the other dimensions such as family and psychological issues. Thus, the main object of current study is to investigate the relationship between parenting Styles, Self-efficacy and attitude to delinquency among high school students. The research method is correlation, and 456 high school students were selected through a random cluster sampling method in the 2012-2013 academic years, and the following measures were administered on them: Baumrind Parenting Questionnaire (1972), Schwartz and Jerusalem Self-efficacy Questionnaire (2000), and Fazli Attitude to Delinquency Questionnaire (2011). Research results showed that there were significant negative relationships between authoritative parenting styles with positive attitude to delinquency, and there were significant positive relationships between authoritarian and Permissive parenting styles with positive attitude to delinquency (P>0.01). Research results also showed that there was significant negative relationship between self- efficacy with positive attitude to delinquency (P>0.01). Also there was significant positive relationship between authoritative parenting styles with self- efficacy, and there was a significant negative relationship between authoritarian parenting styles with self- efficacy (P>0/01). Also, the results of regression analysis showed that self- efficacy and authoritarian and Permissive parenting styles can predict 11 percents variance of positive attitude to delinquency. Finally authoritative, authoritarian, and Permissive parenting styles can predict 43 percents variance of self- efficacy. Thus, it can be concluded that parenting styles and self- efficacy are predictive variables for attitude to delinquency in students; those who are responsible for student’s mental health and families should pay a special attention to it.