The Role of Violent and Nonviolent Delinquent Behavior in Educational Attainment

Given large variations in the etiology and developmental trajectories of violent and nonviolent delinquency, this study examines whether educational outcomes of violent and nonviolent offenders might differ. In particular, this study attempts to remove environmental influences such as family background and neighborhood effects from the effects of delinquency because these factors are likely to differentially confound the effects of violent and nonviolent delinquency on educational attainment. By exploiting variation within sibling pairs, this study finds that the effects of engagement in violent delinquency on education is driven spuriously by shared family background, whereas the effects of nonviolent delinquency are quite robust to adjustment for family fixed effects. Moreover, relying on fixed effects estimates, this study finds that the effects of engagement in nonviolent delinquent activity on educational attainment occur in part through disruption of educational progress, rather than through institutional responses to student delinquency and social-psychological processes.

Soignés, soignants en perte d’équilibre

Working in the health service of the Montreal Prevention Centre, the author presents the observations he made while there. The constant increase in psychiatric cases since 1976, in both number and severity, according to the author, is the result of deinstitutionalization by the Department of Social Affairs. The clientele, suffering from a psychic pathology, expresses its suffering and hopelessness in delinquent activity. Given the limits on intervention in this type of milieu, the ambiguity of the laws and restricted facilities, prison is not appropriate for the psychiatric offender. Victim of the power struggle between the government departments and social organizations, he bears the stigma of the table imposed on wards of the court.

Patterns of Personal and Social Adjustment among Sport-Involved and Noninvolved Urban Middle-School Children

This article examines patterns of adjustment among urban middle-school children as a function of involvement in organized team sports. Four hundred twenty-three seventh-grade students (216 boys and 207 girls) reported on their involvement in sport, self-esteem, delinquent activity, and drug use during the year preceding the survey. Physical Education teachers rated social competence, shyness/withdrawal, and disinhibition/aggression. Compared with noninvolved children, sport-involved youth reported higher self-esteem and were rated by teachers as more socially competent and less shy and withdrawn. Sport-involved youth, including those in contact sports, were not rated as more aggressive than noninvolved children. And though sport-involved youth reported a slightly broader range of delinquent activities than noninvolved youth, sport-involved boys were actually less likely than noninvolved boys to have experimented with marijuana.

Modeling the Patriarchal Factor in Juvenile Delinquency

This article attempts to extend power-control theory by (a) explicitly accounting for the ideological component of patriarchy and (b) examining the influences of extrafamilial socialization agents—peer groups, the church, and television—on the development of patriarchal sex-role attitudes, taste for risk, and delinquent activity. Data generated by a study of high school seniors from three Canadian cities were used for the study. There were substantial gender differences among matriarchal, egalitarian, and patriarchal family types in regard to parental relational and instrumental control, but these differences were not in directions suggested by power-control theory. In a similar vein, the data did not support the argument that the analytic focus must extend beyond the nuclear family and its socialization methods to properly account for the development of patriarchal sex-role attitudes.

The Waterloo Longitudinal Project: Predicting internalizing and externalizing problems in adolescence

We examined childhood social withdrawal and aggression as predictive of adolescent maladaption, comparing and contrasting social and emotional outcomes associated with aggression and social withdrawal. We also focused on childhood social competence as a predictor of adolescent adaptation. The sample comprised 60 children for whom a complete data set was available at both ages 7 and 14 years. The predictors were aggregated measures of social withdrawal, aggression, and social competence derived from three sources—behavioral observations, peer assessments, and teacher ratings. The outcomes focused primarily on markers of internalizing and externalizing problems. The results indicated that childhood social withdrawal uniquely and significantly contributed to the prediction of adolescent loneliness, felt insecurity, and negative self-regard. Aggression predicted adolescent delinquent activity; social competence predicted felt security in the peer group and substance use in adolescence.