An Opportunity Model of Juvenile Delinquency
Open Access
- Author:
- Anderson, Amy L
- Graduate Program:
- Crime, Law and Justice
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 06, 2003
- Committee Members:
- D Wayne Osgood, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Eric Silver, Committee Member
Richard B Felson, Committee Member
Lisa Miller, Committee Member
Barrett Alan Lee, Committee Member - Keywords:
- schools
delinquency
opportunity
social context
multilevel - Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the role of opportunity as a factor contributing to juvenile delinquency. As conceived in this dissertation, youth may be provided a number of opportunities for delinquency not only through personal or contextual characteristics, but potentially through the social contexts of their peers. The school context is the social context used because of the role of the school as a central organizing force in the lives of youth. Schools pull together same-aged youth, release them at the same time of day, and allow many youth to see friends. Research finds that delinquency is often a group event, with other youth serving as useful co-offenders, which points to the potential importance of the school context. The contextual characteristics examined in this dissertation are physical characteristics of the residential neighborhoods of the students, the “social disorganization” of the student population, and family characteristics. The individual opportunity characteristics examined are two characteristics of the family and three opportunity factors, two of which have not been examined in past research (access to disposable income and access to private transportation). The data comes from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the statistical software package used was HLM. In addition to examining total effects, a series of interactions were tested to determine 1) whether physical characteristics of residential neighborhoods were more important when particular family factors were in play, and 2) whether unstructured time use was more important in combination with the “correlates of crime.” A final set of analyses determined whether time use mediates the family characteristics. Some highlighted findings include 1) significant effects of the additional individual-level opportunity factors on various forms of delinquency, 2) a significant contextual effect of unstructured time use, 3) contextual effects had significant explanatory power for explaining between-school variance in delinquency, and 4) support for the presence of the interactions proposed by social disorganization theory. Overall, the results indicate that the opportunity framework and school context are especially useful for explaining several forms of juvenile delinquency.