Please cite this article in press as: Gasper, J., et delinquency. Social Sci. Res. (2009), doi:10.10 Over the past half century, a large body of theoretical and empirical work in sociology and other social sciences has emphasized the negative consequences of mobility for human development in general, and youth outcomes in particular. In criminology, decades of research have documented a link be...

Two major themes in the delinquency literature are the roles of family structure and childhood victimization. Combining these two lines of research, the current project examines the unique contribution of family structure and victimization on the serious delinquency of a nationally representative sample of adolescents. In addition, we examine whether the form of families serves to condition the...

Is there a relationship between personality and criminal behavior? We addressed this question in a representative birth cohort of 862 male and female 18-year-olds. Personality was assessed with the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ). The MPQ measures 10 relatively independent personality traits and was not designed to identify offenders. Delinquency was assessed via 3 data sources...

This study considers the relationship between moral reasoning, perceptions of parenting and self-reported delinquency in a sample of undergraduate students. Correlations showed that several aspects of perceived parenting style were related to moral reasoning, and perceived parental rejection was related to delinquency. Separate analysis for males and females showed the same pattern. Gender of r...

There is a large body of research that shows children from non-intact homes show higher rates of juvenile delinquency than children from intact homes, partially due to weaker parental control and supervision in non-intact homes. What has not been adequately addressed in the research is the influence of changes in family structure among individual adolescents over time on delinquent offending. U...

Little is known about the effects of placing children who are abused or neglected into foster care. This paper uses the placement tendency of child protection investigators as an instrumental variable to identify causal effects of foster care on long-term outcomes--including juvenile delinquency, teen motherhood, and employment--among children in Illinois where a rotational assignment process e...

Within the field of sociology, conduct problems are often described in terms of juvenile delinquency. Juvenile delinquency is a legal term with social implications. Often, delinquent behavior represents an effort of a youth to handle a difficult situation in his or her life, but with behavior which has been proscribed by legislative action. Most legal definitions of delinquency include at least...

Using a dual trajectory modeling approach, we examined co-occurring trajectories of depression and delinquency from age 11 to age 18 and their relation to adult outcome six years later in a community sample of 1423 (674 boys) adolescents. We also examined the effects of childhood externalizing, internalizing, and social problems on trajectory membership for depression and delinquency. The resul...