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
),0(~
:),0(~
2
2
101
2
0
1
0
111
000
10
eij
uu
u
uu
j
j
jj
jj
ijijjjij
Ne
N
u
u
u
u
exy
σ
σσ
σ
ββ
ββ
ββ
=ΩΩ
+=
+=
++=
-3 0 1 3
β0 + β1x1ij
school 2
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