UNSTRUCTURED SOCIALIZING AND RATES OF DELINQUENCY |
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| Authors: | D. WAYNE OSGOOD AMY L. ANDERSON |
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| Affiliation: | D. Wayne Osgood is professor of crime, law and justice and sociology at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. His research focuses on delinquency and other deviant behaviors of adolescence, including the transition to adulthood, time use and deviance, criminal careers, evaluation of juvenile justice programs, and statistical methods.;Amy L. Anderson is assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her research interests include communities and crime, social context and delinquency, family influences on offending, peers and delinquency, quantitative methods and spatial analyses. She is the 2001 winner of the Gene Carte Student Paper Competition of the American Society of Criminology. |
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| Abstract: | This article applies an individual-level routine activities perspective to explaining rates of delinquency. The theoretical analysis also links the opportunity processes of that perspective to key themes of social disorganization theory. Multilevel analyses of 4, 358 eighth-grade students from thirty-six schools in ten cities support the central hypothesis: Time spent in unstructured socializing with peers has both individual and contextual effects that explain a large share of the variation in rates of delinquency across groups of adolescents who attend different schools. In addition, parental monitoring has a very strong contextual effect on unstructured socializing, which supports the proposed integration of routine activity and social disorganization perspectives. |
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| Keywords: | Delinquency context effects routine activities time use communities and crime social disorganization |
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