A Preliminary Test of the Association between Agnew’s Social Concern and Criminal Behavior: Results from a Nationally Representative Sample of Adults

ABSTRACT

In his Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology, Agnew proposed a new theory of crime causation referring to the key independent variable as “social concern.” Social concern theory highlights the nuanced association between self-interest, altruistic behavior, and criminal behavior. Although there is considerable indirect evidence to support the theory—indeed, it is an example of inductive theory construction—there have been few direct tests of Agnew’s statements. As a result, the current study represents one of the first tests of social concern theory by examining the direct relationship between social concern and criminal behavior. We also test whether social concern mediates the effect of sex on criminal behavior, thereby offering insight into the gender gap in offending. Drawing on data from a nationally representative sample of American adults, we perform exploratory factor analysis to construct a measure of social concern. Results from negative binominal regression models reveal that social concern is negatively associated with criminal behavior even after controlling for a host of potential confounders. Additionally, findings indicate a portion of the gender gap in criminal offending may be attributable to females’ (generally) higher levels of social concern.

Notes

¹ VanderWeele (2015:28) shows that the calculation for the natural indirect effect (NIE), when there is no mediator-exposure interaction (as is the case here), is simply $e^{{\beta }_m{\theta }_{sc}}$, where ${\beta }_m$ is the coefficient for the relationship between male and social concern from an OLS regression model and ${\theta }_{sc}$ is the unstandardized regression coefficient gleaned from the negative binomial regression of criminal behavior on social concern. The latter coefficient was exactly equivalent to the natural log of the IRR presented in model 4 of Table 3. Note that all of the other covariates were mean-centered and were included in both regression equations used to calculate the NIE.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael TenEyck

Michael TenEyck is an assistant professor with the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research interests include criminological theory testing, biosocial criminology, drugs and crime, and the psychological correlates of crime. He has published in outlets such as Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Social Networks, PLoS ONE, and Journal of Psychiatric Research.

J.C. Barnes

J.C. Barnes is an associate professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. His research seeks to identify how genetic and environmental factors combine to impact criminological phenomena. Recent works can be found in outlets such as Behavior Genetics, Criminology, Developmental Psychology, and Journal of Marriage and Family.