Testing Gottfredson and Hirschi’s “low self-control” stability hypothesis: An exploratory study

In Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990)A General Theory of Crime, criminal and analogous behaviors are argued to be the result of a stable individual psychological trait referred to as “low self-control.” In this article, we test the proposition that low self-control is a stable characteristic. We conduct a two-wave panel study that measures the self-reported self-control of college students at two relatively close time points. Our test of the stability hypothesis includes conducting four separate analyses of the data (t-tests, correlations, individual change scores, and HLM analyses). In general, we find that most of the dimensions of self-control, and the overall self-control construct, appear to be relatively stable across this short period of time. However, given that the measurements were taken closely together and that we do not find correlations as strong as might be expected, at points the strength of the stability is somewhat unclear. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Chicago, November 1996.