The Predictive Effects of Self-Esteem, Moral Self, and Moral Reasoning on Delinquent Behaviors of Hong Kong Young People
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While external factors such as family and peers were widely known to be predictive of juvenile delinquency, mixed results were reported regarding the effects of internal (personal) variables such as self-concept and moral reasoning maturity. The present study was to delineate the effects of two variables relating to the self (self-esteem, moral self) and the moral reasoning maturity in predicting delinquency. A sample of 266 young people aged between 17 and 21 were invited to complete a questionnaire composed of global self-concept (self-esteem) scale, moral self scale, moral reasoning test, and a daily behavior checklist. Regression and correlation analyses indicated that moral self and moral reasoning were in general negatively associated with delinquency, but global self-esteem did not have significant linear relation with delinquency. Polynomial contrast tests revealed that moral reasoning and moral self to certain extent had a linear trend with delinquency negatively, but global self-esteem exhibited a curvilinear (U-shape) trend with some but not all delinquent behaviors such as sexual misconduct, drug offenses, gambling. The results were then discussed in the light of self-derogation theory and other relevant theories such as the "threatened ego" and the multidimensional model of self-concept, and hopefully could throw lights to explain the phenomenon for further research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".