In my previous myTake https://www.girlsaskguys.com/social-relationships/a51425-what-makes-a-person-likely-to-commit-crime I made a cursory mention about the relationship of peer influence upon deviant behavior/ criminality. Today I'll go into a little more depth about it. As always, I do not own the content cited.
How large of an effect does peer group have on delinquency?
Gang Membership, Delinquent Peers, and Delinquent Behavior by Sara R. Battin-Pearson, Terence P. Thornberry, J. David Hawkins, and Marvin D. Krohn. Looked specifically into the differences between delinquent behavior and simple peer delinquency, but is still quite useful for looking at this topic. Participants were gthered from the The Seattle Social Development Project (SSDP). They then asked responents to self report offense rates, and also received court record offense rates. This study shows that self professed gang members may have been about 8 times more likely to have gotten a violent or nonviolent offense within the past year when compared with their peers who reported that 1 or less of their best friends were engaged in such behavior.
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Contagion and repeat offending among urban juvenile delinquents by Jeremy Mennis and Philip Harris was a massive undertaking that sought to determine if the "spacial contagion" factor was positively correlated with increased recidivism rates. In order to determine this they acquired data on juvenile delinquents from the ProDES (Program Development and Evaluation System) database,
which was developed by the Crime and Justice Research Institute at Temple University under a contract with the City of Philadelphia. As a result they found that in fact that there was a statistically notable correlation between the two. It appears that in fact with the introduction of deviant youth in a particular community (small space) increases rates of criminal offending, in particular with the specific type of offense that the youth previously engaged in. (~.5SD)
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How can we help our children?
I'll give an example of a positive way in which we may be able to help our children, and one way which appears to have a negative effect on decreasing delinquent behavior.
Parenting Practices and Peer Group Affiliation in Adolescence by Brown, Mounts, Lamborn, & Steinberg attempted to demonstrate how parental influence can positively impact the peer group choices of their children. This was a more confusing study that looked at adolescents from 4 different schools across the nation of varying SES, race, population density, and more. They were aware of the limitations of their study, and attempted to account for this. Nontheless, the research is still enlightening and gives us a lot to think about. I think further research needs to be conducted on this question.
When Interventions Harm: Peer Groups and Problem Behavior by Dishion, McCord, Poulin point out that in fact it appears as though interventions, especially specific types, appear to cause more harm than good. According to these authors in fact, of the hundreds of studies conducted on interventions ~30% of them show a negative effect, with many more showing no effect. They further hypothesize that this may actually be an under-representation of the problem as intervention researchers are not as likely to publish negative data. In particular they point out that in particular group counseling, and guided group interactions are correlated with increased delinquent behaviors. This may be a result of aggregating a bunch of already delinquent children together in a sense isolating them from their non-delinquent peers.
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As always, thanks for reading. Input appreciated. Support your local researchers. Buy their work etc.
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