Is This Kid a Likely Experimenter or a Likely Persister? An Analysis of Individual-Level and Family-Level Risk Factors Predicting Multiple Offending Among a Group of Adjudicated Youth

Abstract

To implement effective diversion programs and determine for a well-suited intervention strategy, ascertaining who, among the adjudicated youth, is more likely to involve in multiple offending, rather than desisting after an initial delinquent behavior, is of great significance. The overall objective of this study, therefore, is to contribute to the existing knowledge on assessing the risks for multiple offending during juvenile adjudication processes. In this regard, this study examined the predicting powers of several individual-level and family-level risk factors on multiple offending during adolescence, based on a data set derived from court-ordered social examination reports (SERs) on 400 adjudicated youth in Turkey. Two binomial regression models were implemented to test the predictor values of various risk factors from these two domains. Results indicated the following as significant predictors of multiple offending among the subjects: younger age of onset in delinquency, dropping out of school, having delinquent/drug abusing (risky) friends, being not able to share problems with the family, increased number of siblings, and having a domestically migrated family. Conclusively, these findings were compared with the existing literature, and the policy implications and recommendations for future research were discussed.

Satisfaction with life and crime: testing the link

“…Students caught committing these acts can suffer consequences such as failing a class for cheating on an exam or expulsion from college for plagiarizing a paper. Such socially unacceptable behaviors have been used in previous studies of adolescents (Basque, Toupin, & Cote, 2012;Buker & Erbay, 2018) and college students (Huck, Spraitz, Bowers, & Morris, 2017). We thought it best to include them in our analyses to be consistent with that prior research.…”

Juvenile Sex Offenders in Turkey: A Study on Offense Characteristics, Risk Factors, and the Differences between Juvenile Sex Offenders and Other Juvenile Offenders

“…In order to assess the predictive value of certain risk factors for sexual offending among youth, we matched that main study population of JSO ( n = 460) cases with one of the randomly selected non-sex offender cases ( n = 460) from a separate data set which was collected for an earlier study on juvenile offenders. The data for those cases were collected identically to the data on JSOs’ cases being explored in this study (see Erbay & Buker, 2019; Buker & Erbay, 2018). The comparison group cases include all the same measures for risk factors, permitting a side-by-side comparison through either a goodness-of-fit or a mean comparison test, depending on the level of measurement of each risk factor involved.…”

Youth Who Kill in Turkey: A Study on Juvenile Homicide Offenders, Their Offenses, and Their Differences From Violent and Nonviolent Juvenile Delinquents

“…The first group, offender-level variables, included information about the age, psychopathological issues, SES, and family/social environment of the offenders for all three groups of the offenders. These risk factors were determined based on several risk assessment tools and previously utilized for another study by the authors (Buker & Erbay, 2018) and they were utilized only for the comparisons of these three groups of offenders. The second group, offense (case)-level variables, included information only for the homicides offenses.…”