Cross-level interaction neighborhood disorder and risky lifestyles, juvenile delinquency

1. The impact of neighbourhood disorder on the
relationship between lifestyle risk and
adolescent offending
Prof. Dr. L. Pauwels
Ghent (BE) University

2. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
• Research problem (<literature review):
• “2 stable findings and one unstable finding”
• (1) Neighbourhood levels of crime and disorder
are strongly related to neighbourhood level
adolescent offender rates (Wikström, 1991,
Dolmén, 2003)
• (2) A “risky lifestyle” is a strong and stable
individual level predictor of adolescent offending
(Wikström and Butterworth, 2006) and violent
youth group invilvement (Pauwels, 2008)

3. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
• (3) One would expect that both neighbourhood
and individual level characteristics would explain
individual differences in offending
• Why are results from contextual studies so
inconclusive?
• Theoretical assumptions (“everywhere is
nowhere”)
• Differences in societies where theories are tested
(USA-Europe)

4. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
• Method issues
• Differences in data used
• Cross-sectional studies versus longitudinal
(Brännström)
• Measures of neighbourhoods
• Ignoring other contexts
• Theory and methodology go together:
• Theoretical misspecification and analytical
translation of wrong models

5. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
• Why would we expect the effect of ecological
settings to have a similar impact on individuals
with different characteristics
• Reiss (1993:342) mentioned that there are:
“reasons to expect interaction effects between
individual or family behaviours and community
structure and organization”.
• Put differently, causes of crime may interact with
one another, such that the effects of each are
amplified by the effects of others.

6. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
• Therefore the interaction between ecological
settings and individual characteristics that lead to
crime should be studied more in detail
• Previous studies have argued that effects of
parental control and self-control are dependent of
the eneighbourhood context
• Magnitude of effects is related to neighbourhood
disadvantage

7. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
• From a theoretical point of view more research
should focus on consequences of ecological
concentrations of crime occurence
• Contribution to the research literature of the
present study:
• No study has looked at the cross-level interaction
between lifestyle risk and community context
(controlling for demographics and other social
mechanisms)
• Most studies look at effects of neighbourhood
poverty (poverty = consistent predictor of
neighbourhood and individual level outcomes

8. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
• Ecological settings of crime occurence= good
measure of ecological concentration of
“opportunities and routines”
• routine-risk prone residential settings can be
expected to be more influential to those that lead a
risky lifestyle
• Individuals with a risky lifestyle are expected to
be more “sensitive” to ecological routine risk
residential settings

9. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
• Data:
• Antwerp Young Adolescent Survey (grade 7-8;
aged 13-15 year)
• Conducted 2005
• N: 2486 in 42 neighbourhoods in 23 schools
• Response rate: 93% (in participating schools)
• School level participation; 1/3 Antwerp schools

10. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
• Measure of neighbourhood level disorder (and
crime)
• Survey-based measure
• Aggregation of individual level scale scores of
perceived violence, threats, drunks,
• Ecological reliability: .80 (See Raudenbush and
Sampson, 1999)
• Construct validity: .657 (Key-informant analysis
same questions), .789 (Unemployment rate) and .
557 (recorded crime)

11. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and offending
ZA
Xa Ya
X = Lifestyle risk
Y = Offending
a = adolescent
Z = neighbourhood crime
A = Neighbourhoods
macro-micro-
interaction
•Testing the cross-level hypothesis:

12. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
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N’hood 1
u1,1
u0,2 u1,2

13. General deviance scale Model 1
(Empty model)
Model 2
Controlling for demographics
(t-ratio between brackets)
Fixed part of the model
Intercept 1.442003 (13.407)*
Boys 1.197342 (10.166)*
Both parents Belgian -0.695969 (-5.775)*
One parent family 0.285221 (1.691)
Family deprivation 0.201048 (1.189)
Random part of the model
Neighbourhood level intercept variance
Residual variance at the individual level
0.07348
8.79882
0.00842
8.35184
P-value 0.035 0.402
Lambda 0.280 0.053
Icc 0.83%* 0.00%
Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and offending

14. Dependent: general delinquency scale Model 1 Model 2
(t-ratio between brackets)
Fixed part of the model
Intercept 1.75 (20.9)* 1.76 (20.992)*
Boys 0.43 (4.63)* 0.43 (4.56)*
Both parents Belgian -0.38 (-3.99)* -0.38 (-3.96)*
One parent family 0.08 (0.63) 0.08 (0.609)
Family deprivation (*) -0.13 (-0.84) -0.13 (-0.87)
Parental control -0.08 (-6.45)* -0.08 (-6.48)*
School social bond -0.03 (-2.66)* -0.03 (-2.65)*
Delinquency tolerance 0.16 (12.78)* 0.16 (12.79)*
Lifestyle risk 0.77 (11.45)* 0.75 (11.82)*
Neighbourhood level disorder 0.22 (2.24)*
Random part of the model
neighbourhood variance slope
residual variance
0.09
4.80
0.07
4.80
P-value 0.000 0.000
Lambda 0.567 0.519
Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and offending

15. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
• Lifestyle risk positively affects levels of offending
• BUT: the strength of the effect of lifestyle risk (=
the magnitude of the slope) is increasing when
neighbourhood levels of disorder (and crime) are
increasing
• Individual level characteristics have strongest
contribution to offending
• Maybe we should not focus on poverty, but on
some aggregate level consequences of poverty,
such as neighbourhood crime levels and disorder
levels

16. Neighbourhood disorder, lifestyle risk and
offending
• … but also in crime prevention:
• Preventing crimes to happen from an individual
level point of view= changing moral values and
lifestyles (and to a lesser extend changing settings)
• But decreasing crime levels indirectly will affect
the neighbourhoods impact on adolescent
offending
• Crime prevention projects are always limited:
• Therefore: focus on settings (target on high crime
areas) but work with individuals