School and classroom contextual variations in self-reported offending

• In Event: The School Environment, Crime, and Juvenile Delinquency

Abstract

Something that is rarely addressed in studies on the relationship between education and crime is that both school failure and delinquency are context specific features. They both occur within a climate in which conditions are possible to modify. My point of departure is that context largely is being ignored in the kind of research that has the greatest impact on today´s policy and practice. Preventive intervention programs often focus narrowly on modifying individual or personality characteristics instead of environmental ones. In a previous study I found contextual differences in delinquency between schools and school classes over and above the student composition. In the current study, the intended overall aim is to examine which factors, related to the school- and classroom context, that contribute to this variation. The data used is the Stockholm municipality school survey (a sample of almost all students in ninth grade in lower secondary school in Stockholm), combined with register data on social stratification at the school level to examine whether some aspects encountered in the school- and classroom context can explain the variation in delinquency between schools and school classes. The main method I intend to use is multilevel (logistic) regression.

Author

• Julia Sandahl, Stockholm University