Structural Correlates of Juvenile Property Crime: A Cross-National, Time-Series Analysis

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Abstract
The advantages of cross-national research have been recently rediscovered by criminologists for the investigation and elucidation of relationships between social structure and crime. The richness of this method is found in its ability to capture structural level variance unattainable through within-nation analysis. The present study employs a fixed effect, pooled, cross-section, time-series analysis with a sample of 29 nations over a 25-year span to evaluate a structural model of juvenile delinquency. The findings indicate that selected correlates of juvenile delinquency such as level of industrialization, educational opportunity, national wealth, and guardianship do not always behave as commonly believed. Many of the correlates exhibit curvilinearity, threshold, or saturation effects around which the sign and strength of their relationship with delinquency change. These findings have important implications for delinquency policy and research.