Does size matter ? Comparing delinquency and victimization in a cross-national sample of small town vs. big city youth.

• In Event: Youth Offending and Victimization: Results of the Second Wave of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD2)

Abstract

Traditionally, most of the theorizing and research on delinquency and victimization has focused on urban settings (e.g. Shaw and McKay, Cohen, Miller, and more recently Anderson, Sampson and colleagues). Relatively little research has explicitly focused on delinquency and victimization in small town and rural contexts. In this paper, we employ two subsamples of the International Self-Report Delinquency project (ISRD2): a city sample (n = 40,678) and a small town sample (n = 15,180) to systematically evaluate (1) urban-rural differences in incidence and prevalence of self-reported delinquency and victimization, and (2) urban-rural differences in the correlates (gender, family, school, neighborhood, self-control, opportunity) of delinquency and victimization.

Author

• Chris E. Marshall, University of Nebraska at Omaha