A Friendship-Based Look into Offending Specialization and Versatility

• In Event: Posters I

Abstract

While self-control theory rests on the assumption that people are versatile offenders, differential association and social learning theories have the flexibility to allow for offenders to be versatile or specialized in offending. Drawing on these differing theoretical perspectives, the current paper uses dyadic friendship data to investigate whether self-control or social learning theories best explain the reasons why friends’ offending patterns are specialized or versatile.

The data used in this project come from a dyadic dataset consisting of 2,154 individuals nested within 1,077 self-selected friendship pairs. To analyze these data, we estimate a series of multilevel mixed models within the ‘Actor-Partner Interdependence Model’ (APIM) class. These models regress a measure of offending specialization and versatility onto control- and learning-based measures of actor and partner self-control, differential association, offending, and controls. Overall, these models will demonstrate the individual-level factors contributing to friendship-level specialization and versatility in offending.

Authors

• John Boman, University of Wyoming

• George E. Higgins, University of Louisville