Article Review: Bidirectional Associations Between Self-regulation and Deviance from Adolescence to Adulthood.

Introduction

I will review the study by Billen et al. (2022) on bidirectional associations between self-regulation and deviance from adolescence to adulthood. Some theories stipulate that lower self-regulation leads to deviant behaviour, while other research studies have found that engaging in deviant behaviour was associated with subsequent poor self-regulation. Few studies have looked at the bidirectional association between self-regulation and deviance with mixed results. No study has extensively looked at it for a longer period.

My Verdict

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether poor self-regulation leads to deviance and whether deviance leads to poor self-regulation.

Method:

1. Longitudinal study: There were 8 time periods. Participants were followed from the ages of 10 and 12 years to the age of 30. They filled out questionnaires on both self-regulation and deviance.
2. A random intercept crossed-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) was used to analyse the data.

Results:

1. The bidirectional model fitted the data better than the unidirectional model. This meant that it is not that self-control only affects subsequence deviance (one direction) but deviance also may affect subsequent self-regulation.
2. Specifically, the results showed that, during adolescents (10 to 19 years), deviance was associated with poor self-regulation at a subsequent time but not the other way around. On the other hand, in young adulthood (22 to 27 years), poor self-regulation was associated with subsequent deviance rather than the other way around. See the results in Figure 2 adapted from the original article below.

My take

Implication:

The results suggest that other factors affect an adolescent engaging in deviant behaviour rather than self-control. Put differently, it is not that adolescents engage in deviant behaviour because they lack self-control. Previous studies have identified some factors such as parental supervision and deviant peer association that affect deviant behaviour. The results further suggest that if we do not prevent adolescents from engaging in deviant behaviour, it will affect their self-regulation later. Parents and society should not stigmatise adolescents who engage in deviant behaviour. When stigma happens, adolescents may act out a self-fulfilling prophecy that they are bad people so they should act bad.

Strength:

1. Using longitudinal data fulfils one aspect of establishing a causal relationship (i.e., temporal ordering of variables).
2. Using a RI-CLPM allowed the researchers to isolate between-subject factors (stable traits) from within-subject factors (dynamic trait; which is of interest in the current study). This helps control for other possible influences on the relationship under study thereby eliminating alternative interpretations of the result. Other authors have suggested that it is more appropriate to use a stable trait, autoregressive trait, and state (STARTS) model.
3. The study was preregistered. The authors were transparent in their analysis. They noted the changes they made to their analysis plan.

Limitation:

1. The authors used an average effect for the within-subject effects. This means they assume that the relationship between self-regulation and deviance is the same for every individual. However, this relationship may be different for individuals. That is for one individual, self-control may lead it deviance, while at the same measurement period, self-control may not lead to deviance for another individual.  Including a random slope will help explain this situation.
2. The measurement of self-regulation seems exploratory to me as the authors had to make a lot of adjustments and remove certain items because of measurement fit. Future studies should use standardised measurements. Alternatively, they could have split the data into a training and testing data set and used the testing set to confirm the results of the training data set.
3. The attrition rate was very high. A lot of the participants who started the study (740 participants recorded at time 1) did not finish (287 participants recorded at time 8). This can greatly affect the results.

My conclusion:

We cannot make conclusive statements about the results because of the following:

1. The limitations I have noted above.
2. Other variables affect deviance such as deviant peer association which the authors should have considered in their models to eliminate alternative explanations. As it stands we cannot eliminate spurious effect explanation. The authors did use an already existing data set so it was not possible to decide which data to collect from the beginning. Future studies should try and replicate the findings so that the necessary adjustment be made to theory and practice.

Original paper citation:

Billen, E., Garofalo, C., Weller, J. A., Kirisci, L., Reynolds, M., Tarter, R. E., & Bogaerts, S. (2022). Bidirectional associations between self-regulation and deviance from adolescence to adulthood. Development and psychopathology, 34(1), 335-344. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S0954579420000656

Disclaimer:

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited.