NCJ Number
239419
Journal
Criminology Volume: 50 Issue: 2 Dated: May 2012 Pages: 427-462
Date Published
May 2012
Length
36 pages
Annotation
The primary goals of this study were to test the long-term stability thesis of Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) general theory of crime and to examine the relationship between self-control and social control over time.
Abstract
The data come from a field experiment where the "treatment" consisted of an intentional effort to improve the childrearing behaviors of a sample of caregivers whose children were at high risk of criminal behavior. Caregivers in the control condition were given no such training. The intervention occurred when all subjects were in the first grade (mean age: 6.2 years old), and measurements were taken on self-control and the social control/bond for each subject from grades 6 to 11 (mean ages: 12 to 17 years old). Both a hierarchical linear model and a second-order latent growth model identified meaningful differences in the growth pattern of self-control among individuals in the pooled sample and a difference in the growth parameters for self-control and the social control/bond over time between the treatment and control groups. Both findings are inconsistent with Gottfredson and Hirschi's stability of self-control hypothesis. The same patterns persisted when different analytic techniques and model specifications were applied, which suggests that the results are not an artifact of measurement error, model specification, or statistical methods. Structural equation modeling using the panel design of the data was better able to disentangle the long-term relationship between self- and social controla relationship that was found to be more dynamic than previously hypothesized. (Published Abstract)