Examining the Relationship Between Pet Ownership and Prosocial Behaviors Among Early Adolescents

Prior literature within the field of human-animal interaction has illuminated the potential impact of companion animals on prosocial behaviors. This study explores pet ownership association with both adolescent self-reported and parent-reported adolescent engagement in prosocial behavior, using a large dataset of adolescents in the United States, collected between the years of 2019-2022.

This study analyzes secondary data from the longitudinal ABCD Study. The final analytic sample includes 8504 adolescents (53.4% boys) with an average age of 12.46 (SD = 0.68) at Time 1 and 13.6 (SD = 0.73) at Time 2. Ordinal logistic regressions were estimated within a structural equation modeling framework to evaluate if pet ownership type (e.g., dog owners, cat owners) was associated with increased odds of parent- and adolescent-reported engagement in prosocial behaviors as measured by an adapted subscale from the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire controlling for age and gender.

The parent-report adolescent prosocial latent variable indicated no significant effect of pet ownership. The adolescent self-report prosocial latent variable revealed that adolescents in dog-owning and mixed-pet (e.g., cats and dogs) households had greater odds of agreeing that they engage in prosocial behavior compared to adolescents in non-pet households. There was a significant interaction between pet ownership and gender, with girls in mixed-pet household having greater odds of reporting prosocial behavior compared to boys in non-pet households. Repeated-measures analysis demonstrated relative stability between the Time 1 and Time 2 waves in terms of broad within-group responses to prosocial behavior items.

This research highlights differences between types of pet-owning families in terms of reported engagement in prosocial behaviors.