Exposure to Community Violence and Childhood Delinquency

Abstract

Community-level factors such as disadvantage, disorder, and disorganization have been linked to a variety of antisocial and illicit activities. Although crime and deviance tend to concentrate in areas with these characteristics, not all residents of disorganized neighborhoods participate in proscribed activities. This study examines the relationship between exposure to community violence and involvement in assaultive behavior and weapon carrying among a sample of at-risk youth. Findings demonstrate that controlling for the effects of neighborhood disadvantage as well as other common correlates of delinquency (e.g., family supervision and structure, school attachment, and peer delinquency), youth who witnessed more violence in their neighborhoods were more likely to self-report assaultive behavior and weapon carrying. This research has important implications for the study of delinquency by further identifying the social costs of community violence.

In the Eye of the Impulsive Beholder

“…Although neighborhoods are typically conceptualized from a macro-level perspective, some criminologists have offered compelling rationales that there is substantial variation across individuals in perceptions of their social environment (Caspi, 1993;Wikström & Treiber, 2007). This study, along with others (Hill et al, 1999;Lambert et al, 2004;Patchin et al, 2006), indicates that individual perceptions of neighborhoods do in fact influence the likelihood of offending. These findings suggest that aggregated (i.e., mean level) indicators of neighborhoods may mask more nuanced relationships of how neighborhoods influence offending.…”

Is the Association between Neighborhood Drug Prevalence and Marijuana use Independent of Peer Drug and Alcohol Norms? Results from a Household Survey of Urban Youth

“…Drug use has been shown to increase with age and exposure to peer and neighborhood factors also likely increases with age. 23 Given past research indicating differential effects of neighborhood on problem behaviors by gender, [14][15][16] exposure-outcome relationships were modeled separately for males and females (participant-reported gender). Self-reported race and maternal education were used to describe the population but not treated as confounders, given a lack of direct causal association with the outcome and likely collinearity with explanatory variables.…”

Youth crime and family disruption in Canadian municipalities: An adaptation of Shaw and McKay’s social disorganization theory

“…Another multi-level study using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study by Hoffmann (2006) revealed that the percentage of female-headed families had a positive effect on individual delinquency. Among other individual-and mixed-level studies, a few have demonstrated positive effects of single parenthood on delinquency (Anderson, 2002;Bernburg and Thorlindsson, 2007;Dunifon and Kowaleski-Jones, 2002;Hay et al, 2006;Haynie et al, 2006;Perrone et al, 2004;Rodgers and Rose, 2002;Weijters et al, 2007), whereas others found the effects to be marginal or nonsignificant (Ingram et al, 2007;Katz, 2000;Patchin et al, 2006;Rankin and Quane, 2002;Regnerus, 2003).…”