The relationship between religion and delinquency is shaped by sociocultural context, but little research has explored the relationship for non-Christian religions outside of the United States. This study advances existing scholarship by comparing the crime and illicit substance use of 9,772 Muslim, Christian and non-religious adolescents in the United Kingdom. The Karlson, Holm, Breen (KHB) method is used to explore underlying mechanisms. Results show that Muslims engage in the least delinquency, followed by Christians, while non-religious adolescents engage in the most delinquency. Religious involvement is especially protective for Muslim adolescents. These findings refute a pervasive public perception of Muslim identity as ‘risky’. KHB results reveal that educational motivation and parental supervision underlie religious group differences in delinquency.

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Objective: Identify proximal links between e-cigarette use and numerous indicators of adjustment, delinquency, and other substance use in adolescence, beyond prior levels and confounders. Method:The ongoing Millennium Cohort Study is a nationally representative, intergenerational, longitudinal study of children born 2000-2001 in the United Kingdom followed from birth to age 14 (n=11,564 adolescents and their parents). A series of OLS and logistic regressions compared 14-year old e-cigarette only users to never users and to combustible/dual users on 10 measures of adjustment (school engagement, wellbeing, self-esteem), delinquency (theft, vandalism, disorderly conduct, graffitiing), and other substance use (frequent alcohol use, heavy drinking, marijuana use). Controls included each outcome variable measured at age 11 and prospectively assessed parent-and child-confounders (e.g., parent education; child externalizing and internalizing behaviors, cognitive test scores, gender, race/ethnicity).Results: At age 14, e-cigarette only users (approximately 7% of youth) had a higher risk of adolescent adjustment problems, delinquent behavior, and substance use relative to non-users (75% of youth), but lower risk relative to combustible cigarette/dual users (18% of youth), even after controlling for a host of childhood confounders. Conclusions:Positive links shown here between e-cigarette use and poor adjustment, delinquency, and other substance use in adolescence, coupled with accumulating evidence that ecigarettes substantially increase youths' likelihood of combustible smoking, indicate that ecigarettes are part of an emerging pattern of health-risk behaviors and poor adjustment for some youth.

This study tests the role of crime perceptions in mediating the relationship between religiosity and punitive attitudes about criminal justice. Specifically, we estimate the effects of (a) religious affiliation and (b) fundamentalism on punitiveness and assess mediation by dispositional attribution of crime, perceived rising crime rates, perceived immigrant crime, and fear of violent victimization. Data are from the 2014 wave of the Chapman Survey on American Fears, a nationally representative sample of adults in the United States (N = 1,573). We estimated religious effects on punitiveness using ordinary least squares regression and assessed mediation by crime perceptions with the Karlson-Holm-Breen (KHB) method. Punitiveness was positively associated with Mainline Protestant affiliation (vs. non-religious), Catholic affiliation (vs. non-religious), and fundamentalism (fundamentalism also largely accounted for heightened punitiveness among Evangelical Protestants). Perceptions of crime accounted for about 60% of the effects of religious affiliation on punitiveness and nearly 100% of the effect of fundamentalism. Perceptions of crime as caused by evil or moral failure, belief in rising crime rates, and perceptions of immigrant crime were important to explaining religious effects on punitiveness, while fear of violence was relatively unimportant. These findings illuminate the perceptual mechanisms underlying religious effects on criminal justice attitudes.

This study investigates the association between “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) identity and delinquency using a representative sample aged 16–20 years (N = 2,530) in the United States. The analyses extend prior research by examining SBNR effects across a broad range of delinquent behaviors (theft, fighting, marijuana use, drinking alcohol, and smoking cigarettes) and by testing several theoretically salient mechanisms (religious attendance, peers, parental expectations, images of God, morality, and strain), which may account for the association between SBNR identity and delinquency. I estimate SBNR effects on delinquency using logistic and binomial regression and test mechanisms using the Karlson–Holm–Breen method. SBNR identity is positively associated with delinquency, with the strongest effects on substance use but a nonsignificant effect on theft. The hypothesized mechanisms explain between 54% and 69% of the association between SBNR identity and overall delinquency, depending on the “degree” of SBNR identity reported.