Family Deviance,Self-control,Deviant Lifestyles,and Youth Violent Victimization: A Latent Indirect Effects Analysis

Research increasingly explores more complex relations of low self-control and context factors, such as structural constraints that limit behavioral lifestyle options, with violent victimization. The authors extend extant research by examining indirect effects of low self-control and family deviance on violent victimization via deviant lifestyles. The hypothesized full indirect effects model is tested for 233 African American and Hispanic 11th-grade students using latent variable analysis. Results offer strong support for the full indirect effects hypothesis. Results generally support the utility of an integrative framework that includes structural constraints arising from the family setting.     

Neoliberal governing through social enterprise: Exploring the neglected roles of deviance and ignorance in public value creation

This article makes a case for paying greater attention to how informal relationships between government officials and civil society practitioners impact processes of public value creation. Drawing on data from a five‐year qualitative longitudinal study, we illuminate how civil society practitioners deviate from the formal objectives of social enterprise policies in order to create what they see as having public value. Through a process of theory elaboration, we demonstrate how government officials’ wilful ignorance of, or informal collaboration in, such deviance, precipitates forms of public value that are consistent with wider political objectives. Our analysis adds nuance and granularity to the debate on public value by drawing attention to the arcane ways it may be informally negotiated and created outside of the public sphere. This opens up new empirical and theoretical opportunities for understanding how deviance and ignorance might be symbiotically related in processes of public value creation.”     

The Gender Gap and Cybercrime: An Examination of College Students’ Online Offending

Abstract

As computer and Internet technologies have continued to advance over the last few decades, a considerable amount of research has been dedicated to exploring online behavior. Criminologists, in particular, have been interested in examining cybercrime and online deviance. Contributing to this growing body of scholarship, the current research investigated the effects of gender on cybercrime and whether socialization can account for the gender gap in online offending. Data were collected from a sample of 522 college students and three cybercrime categories were examined: digital piracy, cyberharassment, and hacking offenses. The findings revealed that men were more likely to engage in online offending and that this gender gap was fairly persistent across the socialization variables of self-control and immersion into the cyberenvironment. Specifically, only three gender-invariant findings emerged: men and women commit statistically similar rates of digital piracy when self-control levels are low, and they also engage in similar rates of digital piracy and hacking offenses when Internet use is high. Detailed results, implications for theory and policy, study limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Explaining Bullying Victimization: Assessing the Generality of the Low Self-Control/Risky Lifestyle Model

ABSTRACT

The integrated low self-control/risky lifestyle theoretical framework has proven useful for explaining various types of victimization. Bullying victimization (i.e., verbal, social, or physical attacks), however, may not fit this explanation very well if youths who are bullied do not have to engage in risky behaviors to be singled out by their peers, but could instead be targeted for other reasons (e.g., physical vulnerabilities). In this context, the current paper examines the generality of the low self-control/risky lifestyle model by assessing whether it can effectively explain which youngsters are more likely to be bullied. Using a sample of 1,901 middle school students, the results indicate that, although low self-control significantly predicts whether youths will engage in risky lifestyles (e.g., displaying aggressive attitudes, committing delinquent acts, using illicit substances), participating in such behaviors does not elevate the likelihood of bullying victimization. Instead, the authors’ findings reveal that low self-control directly influences victimization. Further, physical vulnerability is significantly related to being bullied. These findings suggest that the low self-control/risky lifestyle model needs to be revised to accommodate potential age-graded consequences of self-control, and that physical limitations—not “traditional” risky lifestyles—are persistent sources of bullying victimization that should be further evaluated.     

Lifestyles/Routine Activities and Bullying among South Korean Youths

Research on bullying has been conducted primarily in the United States and other western cultures, with less attention paid to the magnitude and sources of the problem in eastern cultures. Framed within lifestyle/routine activities theories, we examined a random sample of 3,121 South Korean middle-school students in order to assess the main effects of factors reflecting guardianship, target suitability, and exposure to motivated offenders on a youth’s risk of being bullied by groups of juveniles. Latent growth curve modeling was used to estimate both cross-sectional and longitudinal effects on self-reported victimizations involving “collective” bullying. Findings and their theoretical implications are presented.     

Toward a Behavioral Model of “Homegrown” Radicalization Trajectories

This research note presents a dynamic risk assessment model of homegrown terrorists. The model was tested in a study of convicted “homegrown” American terrorism offenders inspired by Al Qaeda's ideology. The New York Police Department model developed by Silber and Bhatt was chosen as the basis for creating a typology of overt and detectable indicators of individual behaviors widely thought to be associated with extremism. Twenty-four specific cues associated with each stage of radicalization were used to code and estimate the sequencing of behaviors and the duration of the average radicalization trajectory. Sixty-eight cases have been analyzed thus far. A decision was made to publish the initial results when it became apparent that the model was an effective tool for the evaluation of terrorist offenders.     

A Criminological Fly in the Ointment: Specialty Courts and the Generality of Deviance

ABSTRACT

Specialty courts—such as drug courts, mental health courts, or domestic violence courts—tend to assume, either implicitly or explicitly, that particular groups of offenders have unique problems that can be best met with specialized case processing. Put simply, specialty courts assume that offenders themselves are specialists when it comes to offending. There is, however, a criminological fly in the ointment. The problem is that criminological theory and research have long demonstrated that offenders tend to be generalists and that they rarely specialize in any given form of misbehavior. Accordingly, the authors argue here that the notion of the “generality of deviance” presents a problem for the potential effectiveness of specialty courts because they are likely operating on a faulty set of ideas about offending behavior. The authors offer strategies for moving forward to better integrate the notion of the generality of deviance into specialty courts: in particular, embracing a rehabilitative philosophy and adopting well-documented correctional treatment approaches such as cognitive-behavioral interventions and the risk-need-responsivity model. They conclude by highlighting the risks associated with granting system efficiency a position of privilege among the multiple goals of corrections.     

Online Pursuit in the Twilight Zone: Cyberstalking Perpetration by College Students

The author provides one of the first empirical examinations of cyberstalking perpetration. The extent and nature of cyberstalking are investigated using a sample of college students from a large university in the Midwest. The results indicate that cyberstalking was perpetrated by 4.9% of research participants. In addition, the findings suggest that persons with low self-control are significantly more likely than their peers to perpetrate cyberstalking. Those who participated in sexting were also more likely to engage in cyberstalking. However, these variable effects differed by sex. In particular, women with low self-control were at higher risk of perpetrating cyberstalking, while low self-control did not affect offending risk for men. These results speak to the potentially gendered nature of cyberstalking, while at the same time finding that the prevalence of offending was essentially the same for men and women.     

Examining Sentencing Patterns and Outcomes for White-Collar and Property Crime Offenders

Guided by the focal concerns perspective, the authors examine effects associated with sentencing predictors on incarceration and sentence length decisions for offenders convicted of white-collar and different forms of property crime. Using seven years of data (2004–2010) obtained from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, the authors compare direct and interaction effects of legal and extralegal covariates for white-collar, property economic, and property noneconomic offenders to assess similarities and differences in sentencing outcomes across these crime types. Results indicate more variation exists between white-collar and property noneconomic offenders, particularly in terms of age, race, and gender interaction effects on sentence length decisions. Substantive and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Victim Offender Overlap: Dual Trajectory Examination of Victimization and Offending Among Young Felony Offenders Over Seven Years

The relationship between victimization and offending has been shown consistently across different samples, settings, and crime types. This study uses data from the Pathways to Desistance Study to examine dual trajectories of offending between the ages of 15 and 24 in a sample of male felony offenders. The dual trajectory models demonstrate substantial convergence in victimization and offending. And while there are sizable numbers of youth who continue to be victimized, but desist or decrease in their offending behaviors, very few youth continue to offend in the absence of continued victimization. This study also proposes and tests three criminological theories that have been employed as explanations for the victim-offender overlap—low self-control, lifestyles/routine activities, and street-code attitudes. The logistic regression results indicate that involvement in risky and/or unstructured, unsupervised activities is a key correlate of the victim-offender overlap. The strength of the relationship between routine activity variables and the victim-offender overlap supports the provision of structured, supervised activities for youth and young adults as a way of preventing future victimization and offending, particularly among youth who have high exposure to violence.     

Town twinning and political support

Does town twinning foster citizens’ political support of the European Union? This study investigates the relation, which is maintained in politics and academics but still calls for empirical evidence. We distinguish between two levels of analysis, namely individual and context level, and differentiate in accordance with David Easton’s modes of political support specific from diffuse support. The corresponding hypotheses are tested with a unique dataset, which embraces survey findings of more than 12,000 respondents from 28 randomly selected municipalities in Germany. The main conclusions that emerge from the analysis are: First, town twinning does promote political support of the European Union on the individual level. Second, there are positive effects on specific and diffuse support. Thirdly, there is no relationship between local activity in twinning affairs and political support.     

Organizational Structure,Work Involvement,and Job Performance of Public Servants

The purpose of this study is to understand the predicting role of organizational structure on job performance. Work involvement is tested as a mediator in the hypothesized link. The study presents the results of a cross-sectional survey of 256 public servants in public service departments and agencies in Malaysia. The research results have provided marginal support for the key theoretical propositions. The significant and positive impact of job codification indicates the importance of this factor in predicting job performance of public servants. The empirical link is mediated by work involvement, which suggests that there is an indirect influence of job codification on job performance. This study aims to provide additional empirical evidence on the influence of organizational structure and job performance in the public sector.     

Revisiting the Concept of the Failed State: bringing the state back in

The policy and donor communities have placed great importance on fixing ‘failed states’. World leaders have cited failed states as one of the greatest threats to the global community. Nevertheless the concept of the failed state is currently subject to a backlash from the academic community. Scholars have criticised the failed states literature on theoretical, normative, empirical and practical grounds. We provide a brief overview of these main concerns and offer a more systematic method for measuring ‘state failure’. Coming up with better ways of assessing how states underperform will enhance our understanding of how institutional decay affects stability and development and, most importantly, will provide an improved system of early warning for practitioners.     

The Dictator's New Clothes: The Relationship Between E-Participation and Quality of Government in Non-Democratic Regimes

It is often assumed that the development of e-participation and e-government initiatives aimed at stimulating citizen participation in the political process and fostering more efficient governmental services harbors a great potential for improved control of corruption and government performance. Thus, it is often argued that e-participation is an efficient instrument for increasing transparency and quality of government in non-democratic and developing countries. However, this article argues that these assumptions should be questioned on theoretical, empirical, and methodological grounds. The results of the empirical time-series cross-section analyses show that positive development in terms of e-participation in non-democratic countries does not lead to corresponding positive effects in terms of control of corruption and quality of government. Rather, in many cases the Internet offers political elites new opportunities in their quest for remaining in power.     

Suicidal behavior in a young offender population

Young offenders have numerous problems, including increased psychopathology, housing, and psycho-social stresses and increased rates of substance abuse. The current study investigated the contribution that substance use might make to a particularly vulnerable group of young people. Of the 300 young people approached for the study, 23.7% reported a prior suicide attempt. For this group, the most significant predictors of a prior suicide attempt were negative affect, prior exposure to violence, and housing stress. Life-time substance-use variables were most predictive of the number of suicide attempts a young person might make. Self-reported lethality (the expectation that on the last attempt the young person expected to die) was not strongly predicted by any variable. The research identifies the important role that dynamic risk factors (such as mood, substance use, and psychosocial stressors) play in increasing the risk of self-harm for young offenders, and raises the need to provide for more comprehensive discharge planning and support in order to manage these needs.     

Understanding Sub-Saharan Africa’s Extreme Poverty Tragedy

Motivated by a recent World Bank report on achieving of Millennium Development Goals which shows that poverty has been declining in all regions of the world with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), this study puts some empirical structure to theoretical and qualitative studies on the reconciliation of the Beijing model with the Washington Consensus. It tests the hypothesis that compared to middle-income countries, low-income countries would achieve more inclusive development by focusing on economic governance as opposed to political governance. The empirical evidence is based on interactive and noninteractive fixed effects regressions and 49 countries in SSA for the period 2000–2012. The findings confirm the investigated hypothesis. As the main policy implication, in order to address inclusive development challenges in the post-2015 development agenda in SSA, it would benefit low-income countries in the subregion to prioritize economic governance. Other theoretical and practical contributions are also discussed.     

Observing FDI spillover transmission channels: evidence from firms in Uganda

Abstract

We observe and analyse three intra-industry foreign direct investment (FDI) spillover transmission channels using unique firm-level data collected from on-site interviews and observations regarding domestic and foreign firms operating in Uganda in 2015. Our main results are: (1) the spillover effects mainly depend on the channel(s) by which they occur (the competition channel is most important while spillover benefits through the worker mobility and the imitation channels are less prevalent) and (2) both positive and negative spillover effects occur within the same channel and, moreover, effects differ by channel for the same case. These are novel and challenging findings that have not yet been recognised in theoretical and empirical research on FDI spillovers. Our results suggest that long-term pecuniary spillover effects are predominantly stimulated via the competition channel and show that only limited short-term and long-term technological spillover effects occur through the imitation and the movement of workers channels. These channels are not only less prevalent, but also appear to be constrained by competition-determined spillovers. We are confident that these directions for future research will have a high pay-off because, as shown by this exploratory fieldwork, a more complete picture of the spillover effects is reached when the channels are considered simultaneously.     

Exploring the Social and Individual Differences Among Victims,Offenders, Victim-Offenders,and Total Abstainers

An emerging line of research has begun to reveal that victims of crime share many characteristics with offenders, leading to the conclusion that the victim-offender overlap is quite substantial. Though research suggests victims and offenders are both likely to display signs of low self-control and to share certain lifestyle factors, few studies have sought to systematically analyze the various factors that converge (or diverge) across different groups: victims, offenders, victim-offenders, and total abstainers. Using data obtained from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), we examined the risk factors associated with being classified into each of the four groups. Results revealed that victim-offenders—compared to others—tended to have the highest scores on risk factors for victimization and offending. Conversely, total abstainers tended to score the lowest on measures considered risk factors. Respondents classified as victim only and those classified as offender only were positioned somewhere between victim-offenders and total abstainers in terms of their level of exposure to risk factors. These findings may indicate that victim-offenders are a statistical group in need of greater attention, especially given the benefits that could extend to the broader population if successful outcomes through intervention were realized.     

Regional councils of governments at the crossroads: implications for intergovernmental management and networks

Councils of governments (COGS) have been subjected to powerful forces of change in the 1980s, due principally to drastic reductions in federal financial support. To survive, the councils have had to become more entrepreneural, to extend themselves in new directions They have scanned their local and regional task environments intensively for opportunities to form and/or join new networks and to provide more services in traditional and in new areas. The new style of council is described in this paper, using a market model. The model emphasizes opportunistic scanning of the regional task environment, and the assessment of issue networks as an iterative process in COG direction setting and implementation efforts.     

An education for peace model that centres on belief systems: the theory behind the model

The education for peace model (EFPM) presented in this paper was developed within a theoretical framework of complexity science and critical theory and was derived from a review of an empirical research project conducted in a conflict affected environment. The model positions belief systems at the centre and is socioecologically systemic in design to capture the holistic dynamic of education within community. There is increasing interest, in both academic and development communities, in closing the gaps that exist between theory and practice in educational development in conflict affected settings and providing practioners with practical models. This paper makes a contribution in this through the presentation of the EFPM and the theory that informed its development. There are five key components to the EFPM: belief systems, learning experiences, students, teachers and schools. Belief systems are core as knowledge is generated from culture. Learning experiences are viewed as opportunities for growth, and schools are viewed as environments that provide opportunities and engender cultures for learning and conflict resolution. Teachers, drawn from the local community, are co-creators of these cultures, environments and opportunities and agents of effective change.