THE DYNAMICS OF DELINQUENT PEERS AND DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR*

This analysis examines the dynamic reciprocal relationship between delinquent peer associations and delinquent behavior. It tests the hypothesis, derived from learning and interactional theories, that delinquent peers and delinquent behavior are reciprocally related—delinquent peer associations foster future delinquency, and delinquency increases the likelihood of associating with delinquent peers. It also tests the competing hypothesis, derived from control theories, that delinquent peers do not cause delinquency, but instead, the relationship is (1) spurious due to individual criminal propensity, (2) a result of the effects of delinquent behavior on future associations with delinquent peers, or (3) an artifact of problems of measuring delinquent peers. To test these propositions, we use data from the National Youth Survey and estimate a cross-lagged panel model that corrects for measurement error in indicators of delinquent peers and delinquent behavior. The model species a covariance structure model for ordinal measures. Parameters are estimated by (1) estimating a threshold model relating ordinal measures to continuous latent variables; (2) estimating a matrix of polychoric correlations relating observed variables, and (3) using an asymptotic distribution-free estimator to estimate structural parameters. The results suggest that delinquent peer associations and delinquent behavior are reciprocally related, but the effect of delinquency on peer associations is larger than that of peer associations on delinquency.     

DELINQUENT PEERS,BELIEFS, AND DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR: A LONGITUDINAL TEST OF INTERACTIONAL THEORY*

Three theoretical models of the interrelations among associations with delinquent peers, delinquent beliefs, and delinquent behavior are examined. The socialization model views delinquent peers and beliefs as causally prior to delinquent behavior, whereas the selection model hypothesizes that associations with delinquent peers and delinquent beliefs are a result of delinquent behavior. The interactional model combines aspects of both the socialization and the selection models, positing that these variables have bidirectional causal influences on one another over time. Data to test for reciprocal causality are drawn from three waves of the Rochester Youth Development Study. Results suggest that simple unidirectional models are inadequate. Associating with delinquent peers leads to increases in delinquency via the reinforcing environment of the peer network. Engaging in delinquency, in turn, leads to increases in associations with delinquent peers. Finally, delinquent beliefs exert lagged effects on peers and behavior, which tend in turn to “harden” the formation of delinquent beliefs.     

OPPORTUNITIES AND DECISIONS: INTERACTIONAL DYNAMICS IN ROBBERY AND BURGLARY GROUPS*

Street offenders more often than not are co‐offenders. The theoretical importance of understanding how co‐offending shapes conduct has been recognized for decades but is often ignored by investigators. Drawing from interviews with 50 male robbers and burglars who committed their crimes with others, this paper examines how interactional dynamics modify both the perception of criminal opportunities and criminal decision making. Offenders construct opportunity by improvising situational interpretations, communicating expectations and negotiating shared meanings. As opposed to many prevailing notions of criminal decision making, decisions in groups are incremental, con‐textually situated, and affected significantly by variation in members’influence. The findings, therefore, highlight shortcomings of decision‐making investigations that obscure marked variation in choice by focusing narrowly on individual assessments of risks and utilities.     

MAKING DELINQUENT FRIENDS: ADULT SUPERVISION AND CHILDREN'S AFFILIATIONS*

Although having delinquent friends is one of the strongest known correlates of delinquent behavior, criminologists have been curiously silent as to why some adolescents acquire delinquent friends and others do not. Analysis of data from the national Survey of Parents and Children reveals a strong association between forms of direct and indirect parental supervision and the kinds of friends that adolescents make. Parents who closely monitor their children's affiliations exhibit a variety of traits typical of involved or conscientious parents. Indirect supervision also appears to mediate the effect of attachment to parents, one of the few established correlates of delinquent friendships. These and other findings illustrate the critical role that parent‐child relations play in the process of making delinquent friends.     

DELINQUENT PEERS IN CONTEXT: A LONGITUDINAL NETWORK ANALYSIS OF SELECTION AND INFLUENCE EFFECTS*

In this article, longitudinal social network data are analyzed to get a better understanding of the interplay between delinquent peers and delinquent behavior. These data contain detailed information about the social networks of secondary school students from the same grade, their delinquent behavior, and many relevant correlates of network formation and delinquency. To distinguish selection and influence processes, a method (Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analyses, SIENA) is used in which network formation and changes in delinquency are simulated simultaneously within the context of other network processes and correlates of delinquency. The data and the method used make it possible to investigate an unusually wide array of effects on peer selection and delinquent behavior. The results indicate that similarity in delinquency has no significant effect on the selection of school friends when other network dynamics are taken into account. However, the average delinquency level of someone's friends in the school network does have a significant, although relatively small, effect on delinquent behavior of the respondents, beyond significant effects of changes in the level of self‐control and morality. Another peer‐related change, leaving or joining informal street‐oriented youth groups, also appears to have a substantial effect on changes in delinquency.     

EXPLAINING RATE CHANGES IN DELINQUENT ARREST TRANSITIONS USING EVENT HISTORY ANALYSIS*

Many aspects of the criminal career are amenable to empirical analysis, and in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation of research in the areas of individual offense frequency, arrest frequency, career length, and crime-switching patterns. This research analyzes the effects of explanatory variables on the rate at which officially detected juvenile offenders move from one crime type to another, and the statistical techniques used take advantage of the longitudinal nature of the data. An arrest is considered an event that occurs at a given point in time, and event history analysis is used to model the transition rate from one crime type to another as a function of offense history and offender characteristics. This transition rate encompasses two aspects of the criminal career process: the rate at which arrests take place and the likelihood of transition from arrest to arrest.     

NONSHARED ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES ON ADOLESCENT DELINQUENT INVOLVEMENT AND ADULT CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR*

Findings gleaned from behavioral genetic research have revealed that nonshared environments are particularly important sources of behavioral variation. Surprisingly little criminological research has examined directly the effects of the nonshared environment on adolescent delinquent involvement and adult criminal behavior. The current study addressed this gap in the literature by calculating difference scores in a sample of 289 monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs to examine the effects of the nonshared familial environment on delinquent involvement, adult criminal behavior, levels of self‐control, and contact with antisocial peers. Analysis of MZ twin pairs from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) revealed that one nonshared family environment—maternal disengagement—was associated with delinquent involvement and the development of self‐control. The remaining nonshared familial environments, however, were not associated with antisocial outcomes. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

CO‐OFFENDING AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DELINQUENT CAREER*

This article examines the role of co‐offending in the development of the delinquent career. Hypotheses derived from Reiss's (1986, 1988) taxonomic theory of co‐offending are tested, using police‐reported data on the delinquent careers and co‐offending of 55,336 Canadian offenders. Support is found for a taxonomic theory and for age‐related and functional theories of co‐offending. The taxonomy consists of two types of offenders—high activity (3 percent) and low activity (97 percent)—whose co‐offending patterns differ during the teenage years but not during childhood. For low‐activity offenders as teenagers, the proportion of co‐offenses decreases with criminal experience. The rate of co‐offending by high‐activity offenders as teenagers is lower at onset than for low‐activity offenders, and it varies little with criminal experience. For both offender types, the proportion of co‐offenses decreases with age, is slightly less in males, and varies with the type of offense. For both offender types, the proportion of co‐offenses in childhood offending is greater than in the teenage years and is unrelated to the offender's age or criminal experience.     

CRIMINAL PROPENSITIES,DISCRETE GROUPS OF OFFENDERS,AND PERSISTENCE IN CRIME*

Criminal propensity theorists argue that the causes of variation in offending behavior can be traced to variation in one or more causal traits. Other theorists contend that there is actually more than one type of offender and that more than one causal mechanism operates to explain offending behavior. In this article, some of the implications of these two positions are considered. Then, their congruence with recidivism data from a cohort of post-age-16 North Carolina institutional releasees (N = 848) is assessed, The analysis focuses specifically on whether the correlates of offending persistence are similar across two categories of individuals: those who experienced their first adjudication at an early age and those who were first adjudicated at a later age. In support of both positions, some similarities and some differences in the correlates of persistence were discovered. The differences, however, were only evident when the threshold for late first adjudication was set to age 12. When this threshold was raised to higher ages, the differences disappeared.     

THE TIMING OF DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAMS*

Research Summary: This study examines self-reports from two samples to assess the timing of delinquency. Results imply that the after-school hours are a time of elevated delinquency, but that the peak is modest compared with that observed in official records. Additionally, children who are unsupervised during the after-school hours - the primary target population for after-school programs - are found to be more delinquent at all times, not only after-school. Policy Implications: This finding suggests that factors (including social competencies and social bonding) in addition to inadequate supervision produce delinquency during the after-school hours and that the effectiveness of after-school programs for reducing delinquency will depend upon their ability to address these other factors through appropriate and high quality services.     

SOCIAL CLASS AND DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR

The apparent refutation by self-report studies of social class-related theories of juvenile delinquency is critically reviewed. Improper conceptualization and operationalization of “social class” are considered to be primary causes of inconsistent findings. A more appropriate “underclasslearning class” model of stratification is suggested. Although no empirical support is found for a relationship between self-reported delinquent behavior and socioeconomic status of father's occupation. indications are that social class is somewhat more related to self-reported delinquency using the underclass/earning class model. However, there is no reason to expect social class to emerge as a major correlate of delinquent behavior no matter how it is measured.     

DELINQUENCY AND THE STRUCTURE OF ADOLESCENT PEER GROUPS*

Gangs and group‐level processes were once central phenomena for criminological theory and research. By the mid‐1970s, however, gang research primarily was displaced by studies of individual behavior using randomized self‐report surveys, a shift that also removed groups from the theoretical foreground. In this project, we return to the group level to test competing theoretical claims about delinquent group structure. We use network‐based clustering methods to identify 897 friendship groups in two ninth‐grade cohorts of 27 Pennsylvania and Iowa schools. We then relate group‐level measures of delinquency and drinking to network measures of group size, friendship reciprocity, transitivity, structural cohesion, stability, average popularity, and network centrality. We find significant negative correlations between group delinquency and all of our network measures, suggesting that delinquent groups are less solidary and less central to school networks than nondelinquent groups. Additional analyses, on the one hand, reveal that these correlations are explained primarily by other group characteristics, such as gender composition and socioeconomic status. Drinking behaviors, on the other hand, show net positive associations with most of the network measures, suggesting that drinking groups have a higher status and are more internally cohesive than nondrinking groups. Our findings shed light on a long‐standing criminological debate by suggesting that any structural differences between delinquent and nondelinquent groups are likely attributable to other characteristics coincidental with delinquency. In contrast, drinking groups seem to provide peer contexts of greater social capital and cohesion.     

SIBLING INTERACTION AND SELFREPORTED DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR: A STUDY OF 265 TWIN PAIRS*

The relationship between the quality of twins’mutual attachment and delinquency is examined in a study of 265 twin pairs. It is predicted that twins with stronger mutual attachments will have lower rates of delinquent behavior. Contrary to this prediction, twins’mutual attachment (that is, the frequency with which the twins saw each other in teenage activities) is found to be unrelated to delinquent behavior. The twins often cooperated, however, in their delinquent acts: 61 % of the girls and 79% of the boys reported committing one or more delinquent acts with their twins. In accord with social control theory, social bonds (normlessness, perceived parental acceptance-rejection, and value placed on academic achievement) are strongly associated with delinquent behavior. Except for male DZ twins, however, these same variables are only weakly associated with twins’mutual attachments. A behavioral genetic analysis of the social bonds indicate both genetic and specific environmental components to their variation but fail to show evidence of a shared environmental component. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

EXPLAINING THE GENDER DIFFERENCE IN ADOLESCENT DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR: A LONGITUDINAL TEST OF MEDIATING MECHANISMS*

The extent to which mediating mechanisms account for the gender difference in delinquency was tested on a sample of 2, 753 adolescents studied across three points in time. Results using structural equations modeling showed that males are more likely to be involved in delinquent activities, partly because they are less bound to conventional values, more likely to be associated with delinquent peers, and report more adverse experiences with the authorities. These effects remain after partialling out the stability effect of prior delinquency and other sociodemographidstructral variables. However, although males are more likely than females to report frustration in achievement, frustration in achievement does not directly affect subsequent delinquent behavior in a multivariate context. In addition, adolescent males and females tend to report similar patterns of delinquent activities, and the influences of mediating variables on delinquent outcome are generally similar for males and females.     

DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR,OFFICIAL DELINQUENCY,AND GENDER: CONSEQUENCES FOR ADULTHOOD FUNCTIONING AND WELL‐BEING*

The general aim of this article is to evaluate the consequences of both delinquent behavior and institutionalization as a juvenile delinquent on the quality of adult functioning and well‐being, with a specific focus on gender differences. Data were gathered from two related data sources: a sample of previously institutionalized offenders (n=210) and a sample of individuals living in private households (n=721). Males and females in both samples were interviewed initially in 1982 when they were adolescents and re‐interviewed in their late twenties. Results showed that having been institutionalized as an adolescent seriously compromises multiple life domains in adulthood, especially for females. The data also show that an official delinquent status and a high level of involvement in delinquency during adolescence each has independent consequences for male and female adult functioning and well‐being. Institutionalization is strongly predictive of precarious, premature, unstable, and unsatisfied conditions in multiple life domains but much less predictive of behavioral outcomes. On the other hand, a high level of delinquency involvement in adolescence is predictive of antisocial behavior in adulthood, but it tends to have no direct effects on adversity in other life domains. These results are mostly invariant across gender.     

ADAPTING TO STRAIN: AN EXAMINATION OF DELINQUENT COPING RESPONSES*

Strain theories have conceptualized delinquency as a form of adaptive, problem-solving behavior, usually committed in response to problems involving frustrating and undesirable social environments. The most recent version of strain theory, Agnew's general strain theory, provides the most complete formulation of this argument by suggesting that delinquent behavior enables adolescents to cope with the socioemotional problems generated by negative social relations. To date, however, the actual coping effectiveness of delinquency remains unexamined. This study explores the ways that delinquency may enable adolescents to cope with strain, and it uses national survey data to test the coping effectiveness of delinquent behavior. The findings indicate that delinquency enables adolescents to minimize the negative emotional consequences of strain, and they provide empirical support for the interpretation of delinquency as an adaptive response to aversive environments. Implications for criminological theory are discussed.     

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GANG MEMBERSHIP TO DELINQUENCY BEYOND DELINQUENT FRIENDS*

Both being involved in a gang and having friends who are delinquent have been shown to contribute to an individual's own delinquency. However, the unique contribution of gang membership to delinquency, above and beyond having delinquent peers, has not been well studied. Increased delinquency among gang members may not be due to gang membership per se, but to the members' association with delinquent peers. Using data from the Seattle Social Development Project, this research compared involvement in delinquency for gang members, nongang youths with delinquent friends, and nongang youths who did not have delinquent friends. MANOVA and follow-up ANOVA were conducted to determine differences on measures of delinquency among the three groups at ages 14 and 15. Gang members were found to have a higher rate of offending in the past year when compared with the other groups. The contribution of gang membership to delinquency above and beyond having delinquent friends was also examined using structural equation modeling. Gang membership was found to independently predict both self-reported and officially recorded delinquency beyond the effects of having delinquent friends and prior delinquency. Implications of the results for delinquency prevention and intervention efforts are discussed.