Neighborhood disorder development across the life-course and its relevance for predicting offending

ABSTRACT

Research has indicated a relationship between neighborhood disorder and risk for offending, but little has taken a developmental perspective. Group-based trajectory modeling was used to identify latent developmental patterns of exposure to community disorder during adolescence and adulthood. Negative binomial regression and logistic regression were used to examine the impact that exposure to neighborhood disorder had for predicting offending outcomes in adulthood. Results indicated that a two-group model best fit the data, with both groups demonstrating a great deal of stability. Assignment to the High group was associated with significantly greater offending frequency and odds of offending in adulthood.

KEYWORDS:

• Neighborhood Disorder
• Group-Based Trajectory Modeling
• Life-Course

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The offending frequency measure was assessed to determine if there were outliers present. The block adaptive computational efficient outlier nominator method was used to identify these outliers by using the bacon function in Stata (Weber, 2010). This resulted in the identification of outliers being any values above 100. As such, a top code was applied to the value of 100 with al values higher than this coded as 100.

2. The bacon function in Stata was used to identify outliers for the count offending frequency variable in the same manner as the corresponding outcome variable. The top code for this control variable was applied at 170 in a manner consistent with the outcome variable.

3. Analyses were re-estimated using full-information maximum likelihood estimation in the sem function in Stata. Results were robust when managing missing data in this manner.

4. Sensitivity analyses entailed the modeling of offending variety at age 23 as an additional outcome using negative binomial regression. The relationship between trajectory group assignment and offending variety was non-significant.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Wojciechowski

Thomas Wojciechowski is an assistant professor with the Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice. His research focuses mainly on substance use, mental health, and human development.