495 Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services | www.familiesinsociety.org Copyright 2004 Alliance for Children and Families Religion and spirituality have increasingly acknowledged roles in social work and other helping professions (Bullis, 1996; Canda, 1988, 2003; Joseph, 1988; Tolliver, 1997; Westbrooks, 1998; Zorita, 2003). The emphasis to date has been on how such professionals’ own sense of spirituality and sensitivity to religion and spirituality may affect their practice, as well as on how clients’ spirituality and religiosity may influence clinical outcomes (Hodge, 2003). The per- son-in-environment or ecological framework of social work practice has paid due attention to family processes. Scant attention, however, has been paid to the relationship between parental religiosity and family processes on adoles- cent behavior in light of other influential factors such as peer influences. Relying on a subsample of a nationally rep- resentative sample of adolescents and using multivariate sta- tistical procedures, the study reported here addresses this deficiency in light of social control and social learning the- ories. Spirituality, which differs from religiosity (see Derezotes, 1995), and its influence on adolescent behaviors are not subjects of the study. Findings provide evidence enabling social workers and other practitioners to make more informed decisions about the relative weight they may want to give parental religiosity, family processes, and peer influences when assessing client need and implementing interventions with adolescents and their families in mind. Literature Review Religion and Religiosity Regnerus (2003b) noted that most contemporary studies of the influence of religion and religiosity on adolescent out- comes concentrated on high-risk behaviors, such as drinking, drug use, and sexual activity, whereas a lesser but growing number of studies focused on positive or ideal adolescent behaviors such as physical and emotional health, education, volunteering and political involvement, and family well- RELIGION Parent Religiosity, Family Processes, and Adolescent Outcomes Richard K. Caputo ABSTRACT This study examined the effects of parent religiosity, family processes, and peer influences on ado- lescent behavior in light of social control and social learning theories. Data were obtained from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997. Findings of the study sample of 1,911 adolescents indi- cated that parent religiosity was positively associated with good health and higher levels of education, while inversely related to substance abuse. Adolescents with authoritarian parents had higher levels of delinquency, worse health, and worse mental health than those with permissive parents. Adolescents with uninvolved parents completed fewer years of schooling. Compared with parental religiosity and family processes, peer influences had the most influential effects on delinquency, sub- stance abuse, education, and, to a lesser extent, mental health.