Who’s Hanging and What’s Happening? A Network Perspective on Delinquent Peers Through ‘Situational Action Theory’.

• In Event: Offender–Situation Interaction

Abstract

Adolescents are more likely to offend when spending time with peers and without adult supervision. – This key observation of delinquency research has been supported by recent studies following the framework of Situational Action Theory (SAT). Within SAT, spending time with delinquent friends may influence adolescent behavior by altering opportunities and frictions in certain settings, but at the same time the effect of these situational factors is dependent on individual propensities which vary between adolescents.
One issue of continuing interest in recent research is the measurement of delinquent friends. The association between a person’s own delinquency and his friends’ delinquency is overestimated when respondents report about their friends’ behavior (indirect measurement). Studies using social network analysis to construct a direct measure of delinquent friends based on the friends’ self-reported delinquency tend to give a more realistic picture of this association. In this presentation we use data from a recent German school survey including network data and a direct measurement of delinquent friends. We analyze how the role of delinquent friends and the effects of a risky lifestyle in explanatory models within the SAT framework change if one moves from an indirect to a direct measurement of friends’ delinquency.

Author

• Dominik Gerstner, Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law