Adolescent Crime: Individual Differences and Lifestyles

By Per-Olof H. Wikstrom and David A. Butterworth
Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2006

The authors report on analyses from their Peterborough Youth Study (PYS)—one intended to respond to a lack of current research on delinquency and its causes in the United Kingdom.  During 2000-01, the PYS collected cross-sectional data through self-report questionnaires targeting all tenth year students in the 13 Peterborough state schools (2,118) and interviews of a random sub-sample (409) concerning their last week day-to-day activities, and it used census data on neighbourhood disadvantages and population characteristics.  The authors appear to have taken aggressive steps to ameliorate some of the problems common to survey methodology, especially regarding construct reliability and response validity in the use of their instrument.  The inclusion rate of their target sample is impressive: 92.4% for the questionnaire study and 82.9% for the interview study.  A description of the city of Peterborough makes it seem plausible that its population is fairly typical, results of the PYS are not specific to the city, and the study is broadly replicable. 

Findings from analyses of the questionnaire and census data begin with a detailed quantitative description of the outcome variables--criminal offending, victimisation, and substance use--as well as connections between them.  Included are incidence and prevalence rates according to variables such as detection by police, gender, offense type, location, use of a weapon, injury as a result, victims’ offending, and use of substance types.  Chapters reporting results are prefaced with discussions of the literature’s relevant theoretical and methodological issues and debates surrounding certain classes of risk variables.  Differences in prevalence and incidence, regression analyses, and controls for gender and ethnicity are used to explore direct, indirect, and interactive impacts of family social position (social class, structure, and ethnicity), individual characteristics (social bonds, self-control, and moral values), community context (neighborhood disadvantage and school structural risk), and lifestyle (peer association, high-risk public environment, substance use, and overall risk). 

The study replicates many research findings in the United States and Canada, yet produces its own variations along with a few unique findings and interpretations.  For example, a multiple regression analysis of personal and structural risk measures identified lifestyle and individual risk-protection, and an interaction between them, as most important in explaining offending.  Drawing from developmental/life course criminology, the authors constructed an interesting and useful adolescent offender typology based on individual risk-protection scores: a small number of propensity-induced offenders with a strong tendency to offend regardless of lifestyle risk, lifestyle-dependent offenders whose moderate personal disposition to offend is amplified by risky lifestyles, and more well-adjusted situationally limited offenders whose weaker tendency to offend depends more on a moderately risky lifestyle. 

Also, preliminary findings from the time-budget diary study shed more light on offender’s routine activities.  Key findings include that nearly all offenses occur in the presence of peers and in public, offenders offend an average of less than two hours a week, routine activities varied a little by family structural risk but much more by individual risk-protection, time spent on school and peer-related (but not family) activities varied by community structural risk, peer centredness (vs. family centredness) mediated between poor parental monitoring and offending, time spent in high risk situations mediated between peer centredness and offending, and peer centredness does not impact offending levels for youths with protective individual risk-protection scores but family centredness reduces offending for youth with less protective scores.

The book makes a contribution to the literature by extending trends in criminological research to the UK and identifying possible variations in the way that risk factors operate.  It is certainly worthy of citation in scholarly writing, the questionnaire and official data study can be replicated in areas where the need for cross-sectional data has not been met, and the space-time budget diary method warrants more trials.  While the researchers are fairly exhaustive with their analyses and use as many techniques appropriate for the type of data as possible, as they acknowledge, the study is limited because of the use of cross-sectional data.  The study of the causes and inhibitors of delinquency in the US and Canada has been improved by the use of longitudinal designs, and so too would future studies in the UK.  For teaching, the book’s level of sophistication is appropriate for senior undergraduate and first-year graduate students.  In general, the authors accomplished their goal to establish that delinquency in the UK is worthy of much more study.