Prevalence Levels of Adolescent Delinquency: Cross-National Self-Report Survey Evidence

• In Event: International Research on Juvenile Justice

Abstract

This paper presents findings of a study applying cross-national evidence to assess competing narratives within criminology about contextual variation in the age-crime relationship—most prominently, whether the prevalence of adolescent lawbreaking is high, with teens committing crime(s) more often than other groups. Crime encompasses a wide variety of behaviors, and delinquency even more so, complicating clear-cut definitions and measurements of our discipline’s focal dependent variable. Particularly when measuring adolescent involvement, one tendency has been to include antisocial, risky, morally disapproved, or other “delinquent” behaviors that verge on or outside the margins of "criminal." Such broad, imprecise definitions lead to ambiguous and elastic representations of crime that are prone to amplifying involvement—and produce results flexible for varying interpretations. Utilizing self-reported delinquency data from well-respected surveys conducted in China, England, South Korea, and the United States—along with data from the Second International Self-Reported Delinquency Study—we show that there are large differences in the prevalence of teen offending when the delinquency metric is limited to lawbreaking behaviors as opposed to combining lawbreaking and non-criminal behaviors. The prominent implication of our findings is criminological importance for studying and theorizing about age-crime patterns in a global context.

Authors

• Darrell Steffensmeier, Pennsylvania State University

• Jessie Slepicka, The University of Montana

• Jonathan Lee, Penn State Harrisburg

• Nicole W.T. Cheung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Hua Zhong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong