Do Weapons Facilitate Adolescent Delinquency? An Examination of Weapon Carrying and Delinquency Among Adolescents.

This article examines whether weapon carrying influences the frequency and variety of violent, property, and drug delinquency adolescents commit through fixed-effects analyses of data from the Rochester Youth Development Study (RYDS). We conclude that weapon carrying contributes to violent, substance, and property delinquency, and delinquent behaviors learned during weapon carrying continue to affect substance and property delinquency long after carrying has ceased.

Like Parent Like Child? The Role of Delayed Childrearing in Breaking the Link Between Parent's Offending and Their Children's Antisocial Behavior.

This paper investigates the impact of parents' history of violent offending, their age at first birth, and the interaction of the two on their adolescent children's violent behavior. We employ intergenerational longitudinal data from the Rochester Youth Development Study to estimate parental trajectories of offending from their early adolescence through early adulthood. We show that the particular shape of the parents' propensity of offending over time can interact with their age at first birth to protect their children from delinquency. We investigate these relationships for children at 6 and 10 years of age. We find that for some groups delaying childrearing can insulate children from their parents' offending.

Are Risky Youth Less Protectable As They Age? The Dynamics of Protection During Adolescence and Young Adulthood.

Research on recidivism in criminal justice and desistance in criminology are not integrated. Yet, both fields seem to be moving towards models that look at how positive elements in a person's environment can impact a person's behavior, conditional on different levels of risk. This study builds on this observation by applying interactional theory and the concept of Risk-Needs-Responsivity to theorize that both Needs and Responsivity will change over time in predictable ways. We then use a novel empirical approach with the Rochester Youth Development Study to show that even in late adolescence, individuals who are at risk for violence can be protected from future violence and risky behavior like gun carrying with positive events in their environment and personal life. In young adulthood, fewer people are still at risk for violence, and those who are at risk are harder to protect from future violence and gun carrying.

Family transitions and later delinquency and drug use.

Changes in the family structure can be very disruptive to adolescents who live in those families. This article examines the impact of the number of family transitions on delinquent and drug-using behavior. Specifically, the effect of family transitions is hypothesized to be mediated by problems within the family, school, and peer settings. A sample of 646 boys (73%) and girls (27%) taken from a longitudinal panel study of high-risk adolescents are used to examine these hypotheses. For girls, little support is found for the direct or the indirect effect of family transitions on delinquent behavior or drug use. For boys, however, both forms of problem behavior are influenced by family transitions directly and indirectly through changes in, and problems with, peer associations. The findings suggest that during times of family turmoil, the friendship network of adolescent male children is also disrupted, leading to an increase in associations with delinquent others and, in turn, an increase in problematic behaviors.

Linked lives: the intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior.

There is a strong assumption of intergenerational continuity in behavior patterns, including antisocial behavior. Using a 3-generation, prospective study design, we examine the level of behavioral continuity between Generation 2 (G2) and Generation 3 (G3), and the role of economic disadvantage and parenting behaviors as mediating links. We estimate separate models for G2 fathers and G2 mothers. Data are drawn from the Rochester Youth Development Study, a longitudinal study begun in 1988 during G2's early adolescence (n = 1,000), which has collected prospective data on G2, their parents (G1), and now their G3 children. Results show that intergenerational continuity in antisocial behavior is evident, albeit somewhat modest. Parenting styles and financial stress do play a mediating role, although their effects vary by G2's gender. In general, adolescent delinquency plays a larger role in linking the generations for G2 fathers, whereas parenting behaviors and financial stress play a larger role for G2 mothers.