Race, Gender, and Perceptions of Peer Delinquency: A Within-Subject Analysis

ABSTRACT

We generated a within-subject analysis that assessed whether changes in delinquency from the same youth were associated with changes in the degree to which the youth perceived the delinquency of their peers across three waves of data. We hypothesized that the effect of within-person changes in perceptions of peer delinquency on changes in delinquency across time should be greatest among young black males. The results revealed that a within-person change in the youths’ perceptions that their peers were engaging in greater delinquency increased offending across time. They also showed that young black males were more likely than young white males and young black and white females to increase their level of delinquency, within-person and across time, when they perceived an increase in their peers’ levels of delinquency. We conclude that scholars may generate deeper theoretical insights and policies that are more efficacious when they reveal the causes of crime that are universal and those that uniquely affect a specific group.

Notes

¹ Note that our purpose is not to test whether youths’ perceptions of the degree to which their peers were delinquent can explain – mediate – race and gender differences in crime (Jensen 2017).

² A few studies have shown that there are differences in the effects of peer group measures but they provide no statistical tests for the whether the difference in the effects are statistically significant (see, Johnson 1979; Smith and Paternoster 1987).

³ McMillan, Felmlee, and Wayne Osgood (2018) found that their interaction term did not predict increased levels of smoking or drinking – that is, it only predicted increased levels of delinquent behavior. Similarly, Powers et al. (2017) analyzed data collected from college students in Florida and found that the effect of the perceived estimation of the proportion of the respondent’s best friends who had been physically victimized by a romantic partner on intimate partner violence victimization by one’s current partner was significant for females but insignificant for males.

⁴ Note that Young et al. (2014) and Young (2015) found that the effect of self-reported peer delinquent behavior on delinquency was substantively less than perceptions of peer delinquency and that McMillan, Felmlee, and Osgood (2018) found that the interaction effect was greater among females than males.

⁵ We present the analyses including Hispanics in the sensitivity analyses section.

⁶ For the first wave, the youths were asked whether they had trouble with the police in the past instead of only for the previous year.

⁷ Results from the estimations with and without the imputed values in the dependent variables were similar.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James D. Unnever

James D. Unnever is Professor of Criminology at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. He has published extensively on race and crime, most notably in his books A Theory of African American Offending: Race, Racism, and Crime and Building a Black Criminology: Race, Theory, and Crime. His research areas also include public opinion about crime-related issues, the impact of religion on punitiveness, testing theories of crime, and school bullying. He was the 2009 recipient of the Donal A. J. MacNamara Award of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

Cecilia Chouhy

Cecilia Chouhy is Assistant Professor in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice in Florida State University. She received her PhD in criminal justice from the University of Cincinnati in 2016. Her main research interests include national and international studies of macro and micro-level criminological theories and exploring different sources of public opinion and punitiveness. Her recent work also focuses on race/ethnicity and crime as well as immigration and crime. Her writings have appeared in different edited books and peer-reviewed journals.