Results revealed that deviance among these adolescents can be explained by a synthesis of three of the major theoretical explanations of deviant behavior: social integration, social learning, and labeling. Delinquency among these youths can be understood in terms of concentric levels of social integration. The main source of deviant group membership among these youths was a failure to integrate them, through their families, into their own ethnic community and into the larger society. Three major types of families failed to achieve these types of social integration: absent or partially absent family systems and two types of marginal family systems. Youths who were not effectively socially integrated engaged in a process of social learning in which they acquired the traits and attitudes of an age-segregated youth society. They were then labeled as undesirables by the Vietnamese community, as they failed to conform to the shared expectations of Vietnamese American adults. These expectations appeared to be the products of an ethnic identity created by the process of immigrant resettlement. Figures and 36 references (Author abstract modified)