This study investigates whether unstructured spare time is a significant correlate of self-reported offending among adolescents in multiple countries. Drawing on survey data from 58,425 13-to-17-year-olds in 21 countries in Europe, North America, and South America, we examine whether time spent in unstructured out-of-home and at-home activities, as well as structured time at home, is associated with offending prevalence and incidence. Using multivariate models that control for key criminological predictors, we find that unstructured out-of-home spare time is a robust and consistent correlate of self-reported offending. Its estimated association is larger than that of most classical predictors. While structured spare time at home is associated with lower levels of offending, unstructured spare time, particularly out-of-home, is strongly linked to both prevalence and incidence of crime involvement. Country-specific analyses reveal that this pattern holds across most national samples. Simulation analyses suggest that modest reductions in unstructured out-of-home spare time may be associated with lower levels of adolescent offending. These findings indicate that unstructured time environments constitute a cross-culturally robust correlate of adolescent offending, with potential relevance across dispositional and opportunity-based explanations, and with implications for how prevention frameworks conceptualize adolescents' everyday environments.

Measuring delinquency and victimization during adolescence is critical, given their high prevalence and the strategic importance for violence prevention. Knowledge about the prevalence and risk factors of delinquency and victimization in adolescents relies almost exclusively on self-report studies. Traditionally, such research has been conducted in schools, which allows the inclusion of diverse population groups. However, access to schools remains a significant challenge. This study examines whether school-based probability samples and internet-based non-probability samples are comparable for research on adolescent violence. Using data from 2028 Argentine adolescents (1130 school based and 898 internet based) from the International Self-Report Delinquency Study 4 (ISRD-4), we analyzed selection effects by comparing prevalence rates of both samples and by examining the interaction between survey methodology and theoretical predictors. Results revealed selection effects; the online sample showed lower prevalence rates of violent delinquency and victimization and was composed of more females and adolescents with higher self-control and moral beliefs. The interaction effects showed that the gender-delinquency relationship was significantly stronger in the school sample, suggesting sampling methodology influences this association. While low self-control predicted both delinquency and victimization consistently across samples, low morality specifically predicted delinquency. Assuming external validity of the school sample, these findings provide evidence that although internet-based sampling may produce biased prevalence estimates, it can nevertheless yield valid estimates of the theoretical associations between individual propensities and violent behavior when school access is limited.

Crime motivated by hate toward social groups and identities is a major social problem. Due to the rise of interethnic, ideological, and religious tensions, the criminal policy relevance of this crime has increased. One compelling question for hate crime researchers has been whether hate crime is different from general crime. In this study, we draw on the most recent available comparative European dataset, the third sweep of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study ( N = 34,871), to explore the extent and correlates of hate crime offending across sampled urban youth populations from 17 European countries. We find that 2.5% of 12–16-year-olds reported involvement in a hate crime. Country rates range from 0.7% to 6.5%, with the lowest figures observed in Western Europe and the highest figures observed in Southeast Europe. The individual-level risk factors of hate crimes tend to be the same as in other offending, thus supporting general rather than specific causation. However, some evidence suggests that some risk factors were particularly strongly associated with committing hate-motivated crimes: disorder in neighborhood, risky routines, discriminatory attitudes, low self-control and propensity to feel shame, lifetime delinquency, male gender, and hate crime victimization. Country-level differences in the studied individual-level risk factors only partly explained the differences between urban youth populations in the prevalence of hate crime, thus indicating national-level contextual effects that should be further explored in future research. As our data are based on city-level samples rather than full national populations, these findings should be interpreted as reflecting differences between urban areas in different countries rather than nationwide patterns.

The current study investigates the association between physical child maltreatment and juvenile delinquent behavior in the context of the Situational Action Theory (SAT) (Wikström, 2006, 2017, 2020). Self-control, morality and exposure to criminogenic settings are proposed as possible mechanisms explaining the association between physical child maltreatment and adolescent offending. The hypotheses are tested in a subsample of the third wave of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD3), a large international non-clinical study on delinquency and victimization among adolescents. The final sample consists of N = 24,956 adolescents aged 12–16 years from nine West European countries. While controlling for dependence due to nested data and several covariates, the models are tested for overall offending and separately for violent and property offending. Results confirm that physical child maltreatment is associated with the main concepts of SAT (lower self-control; lower morality; and more exposure to criminogenic environments), which in turn are associated with juvenile delinquency. The models show partial mediation for overall offending, property offending and violent offending. The findings provide support for the theoretical prowess of SAT and its main concepts: self-control, morality and exposure to criminogenic settings as mediators in the well-established physical child maltreatment/delinquency link. These findings are consistent with the ‘cycle of violence’ perspective and contribute to the theoretical clarification of the mechanisms involved in the child maltreatment/delinquency link. The findings fail to confirm a ‘crime-specific propensity’. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for prevention.

Our study draws from a natural experiment created by the school lockdowns in Finland during the 2020 coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic to compare at-school and home-based responses to an online youth crime survey. Using our quasi-experimental design, we examine how at-home responses during the Covid-19 lockdown affected the sample composition and reported prevalence of offences in the nationally representative Finnish Self-Report Delinquency Study 2020 (FSRD-2020) survey (N = 5503). We compare these within-year changes in 2020 to the earlier FSRD-2016 survey (N = 5955) that did not involve a transition to at-home response. According to our analysis, the share of males decreased in remote schooling. We also detected a decrease in reported offences during lockdown (remote school response) in several types of offences, net of observed compositional changes. The findings suggest that at-school data collection helps secure more inclusive samples and encourages students to self-report their offending behaviours.

dichoct dichotomizes varname at the specified centile and generates newvar containing the dichotomized values (0, 1). Dichotomizing a variable at a specific centile will not always result in an optimal split (for example, dichotomizing at values > or >= the centile value will yield different results -- especially if the value of the centile is frequent and is not exactly at the boundary of the interval including this value. dichoct chooses to include or to not include the centile value in the upper interval of the split (i.e. dichotomizes at values >= or > the centile value) so that an optimal split is achieved. "Optimal" means that the resulting percentages of the values of the dichotomized variable are closest to the desired percentages.