COMMUNITY STRUCTURE AND ADOLESCENT DELINQUENCY IN ICELAND: A CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS*

The current study examines the contextual effects of community structural characteristics on adolescent delinquency in Iceland, focusing on how specific individual‐level mechanisms work to mediate the contextual effects. Using multilevel data on 68 school communities and 6,458 adolescents, we find a contextual effect of community social instability (residential mobility, family disruption) on delinquency. Moreover, the findings indicate that specific individual‐level social control mechanisms (Coleman, 1988) explain a part of this effect, namely, embeddedness in community‐based social ties linking parents and adolescents and normlessness. Also, the findings indicate that the individual‐level effect of unsupervised peer activity on delinquency is contingent on embeddedness in social ties as well as on community social instability. The findings have bearing on the cross‐societal generalizability of social disorganization theory.