中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: Children and juveniles' firepaly behavior causes considerable damage in almost every society. For example, according to the statistics of Department of Fire Prevention of United States that Children's fireplay behavior causes sixty-five thousand fires in the year of 1997, and two hundred and eighty four people’s death, two thousand and one hundred fifty eight peoples' injury, two hundred and eighty millions U.S. dollars' property damage. The above statistics do not include fires not reported yet. It is estimated that the fires not reported are three times as much of fires reported. At the same time, the prevalence of firepaly behavior is also pretty high. According to the survey of Kolko, Day, Bridge & Kazdin (2001) that community children's fireplay rate is 42.8% and inpatient children's fireplay rate is 63.3%. However, the damage caused and the prevalence are both high for fireplay behavior, it is not investigated intensively in Taiwan. Searching of ”The Doctoral and Master's Thesis Information Net of Taiwan” and the authorized research cases of Department of Fire Prevention of Ministry of Interior, we do not find a single paper addressing fireplay behavior. The related institutes of government and the civility do not take this problem seriously as well. In view of the above facts, the present study investigates the juveniles' fireplay behavior. Due to the domain of fireplay behavior is broad, the present study focuses on the relationship between fireplay and firesetting behavior. The main reason is that the following assumption is important theoretically: severe deviant behavior usually starts from minor deviant behavior. That is, severe deviant behavior may undergo a progressive process. The hypothesis of the present study is that firesetting behavior (severe deviant behavior) usually starts from fireplay behavior (minor deviant behavior). That is, we attempt to test the above assumption by investigating the relationship between fireplay and firesetting behavior. Methods: The present study includes two parts of subjects. One is delinquent male juveniles who are from Taiwan's Reformatory Schools. The other is normal male juveniles who are selected from junior and senior high schools' students of Taipei and Hua-Lian. The effective sample size of delinquent and normal male juveniles is 917 and 141 respectively. Regarding the research tool, anonymous self-report questionnaire is adopted to collect data. The variables measured include: frequency of firepaly and firesetting behavior in one year; juveniles who play fire, setting fire, or do not play and setting fire (that is, no-fire group); the variables influencing fireplay and firesetting behavior that include learning, functional, containment, and trait factors. It is hypothesized that the frequency of firepaly and firesetting behavior in one year is significantly related, the fireplay behavior could effectively predict the frequency of firesetting behavior, and the scores of fireplay juveniles on learning, functional, containment, and trait factors were consistently higher than no-fire juveniles and lower than firesetting juveniles. The scales measuring learning, functional, containment, and trait factors are shown to possess sufficient reliability and content validity.