Delinquent behaviour and attitudes to formal authority

A scale was developed to assess attitudes towards formal authority in the school and in the public domain (police and law). Data derived from a sample of young adolescents (13 years) indicated that attitudes towards authority in these two domains were highly rated (r = 0.57, P less than 0.001). Factor analysis yielded four interpretable factors--alienation from the institutional system, belief in the absolute priority of rules, perception of the bias vs. impartiality of authorities, and personal relationship to school life--accounting for 47.6, 13.9, 9.3 and 8.0 per cent of common variance respectively. Both overall attitude scores and factor scores were significantly related to self-reported delinquencies. Finally, covariance analysis of the results indicated that the attitude variable accounted for a substantial proportion of the sex difference in delinquency.