A Focus on Familial Strain: Antisocial Behavior and Delinquency in Filipino Society.

The article focuses on the effects of familial strain on the antisocial behavior of Filipino children. Criminologists have long recognized the salient role of the family in explaining delinquency. However, explanations using family measures have been derived mostly from the paradigms of differential association and social control. This paper uses Agnew's General Strain Theory to examine two types of familial strain: witnessing interparental violence and direct parent-to-child violence, specifically its impact on children's antisocial behaviors. These two family measures are then juxtaposed against traditional explanations of delinquency and antisocial behavior. The salience of the family in explaining deviant behavior has had a long tradition in sociology. Its inclusion in models predicting delinquency or criminal behavior is ubiquitous in criminological literature and remains an enduring feature in many explanations of deviance and crime . However, empirical studies that examined the impact of family measures on delinquent behavior have mostly conceptualized family within the paradigms of social control and differential association. Measures derived from these paradigms would typically account for the degrees by which parents and other family members transfer favorable definitions of delinquency to other family members, in the case of differential association, or effectively socialize individuals to conventional norms, in the case of social control.