NCJ Number
199314
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 43 Issue: 1 Dated: Winter 2003 Pages: 169-195
Date Published
2003
Length
27 pages
Annotation
This article describes the purposes, methods, and early findings of the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime (Scotland), a longitudinal study of 4,300 youth in Edinburgh and the neighborhoods where they live.
Abstract
The sample consists of youth who began secondary school in Edinburgh in August 1998, when most were between 11 1/2 and 12 1/2 years old. The study goals are to further understanding of criminal offending by youth by examining the physical and social structure of their neighborhoods, their individual development through the life course, and interactions with the official apparatus of social work and law enforcement. The study is not concerned with the childhood origins of criminal inclinations, but rather focuses on explaining why such inclinations are sometimes translated into serious, frequent, and persistent criminal offending, but often are not; it will also explore why some criminal careers end much sooner than others. The study intends to collect information about individuals from multiple sources and set the data in the context of social geography and spatial crime patterns. Information about individuals is to be collected from the youth themselves, from their families and teachers, and from a range of official sources. Each member of the cohort will complete 19 annual questionnaires if the study continues from age 12 to 30. In the sweep I questionnaire, respondents were asked whether they had ever engaged in each of 15 kinds of delinquent behavior. With the exception of truancy, all of the behaviors might be interpreted as criminal offenses. The volume of offending was about twice as high among boys as among girls at age 11-12. The volume of offending was lowest (7.25) among children in two-parent families, and it was considerably higher among children who were living with their mother and stepfather (12.02), or with a single father (12.34), but among children living with a single mother, the volume of offending was less elevated (10.09). The volume of offending was somewhat elevated among families where no parent was at work (11.81). There was some relationship between volume of offending and social class; for families at the margins of the economic system, youth tended to report an elevated rate of offending. The strongest correlation of all was that between the number of friends who were offenders and the individual's own offending. There was a strong relationship between adversarial contact with the police and offending; this, however, was simply a function of offending behavior. Overall, early findings at the individual level confirm the importance of impulsivity or its converse, i.e., self-control. 6 tables, 48 references, and appended list of delinquency items in sweep I and definitions of variables