Childhood Predictors and Adult Life Success of Adolescent Delinquency Abstainers.
While much is known about adolescent delinquency, considerably less attention has been given to adolescent delinquency abstention. Understanding how or why some adolescents manage to abstain from delinquency during adolescence is informative for understanding and preventing adolescent (minor) delinquency. Using data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (N = 411 males) to compare abstainers, self-report delinquents and convicted delinquents we found five childhood factors (ages 8-10) that predicted adolescent abstention (ages 10-18). First, we find that adolescent abstainers possess characteristics opposite to those of convicted delinquents (namely, abstainers are high on honesty, conformity and family income). However, we also found that abstainers also share some childhood characteristics with convicted delinquents (namely, low popularity and low school achievement). A latent class analysis indicated that the mixed factors predicting abstention can be accounted for by two groups of abstainers: an adaptive group characterized by high honesty, and a maladaptive group characterized by low popularity and low school achievement. Further, validation of these two types of abstainers using data collected at age 48 suggested that adaptive abstainers outperform all other adolescents in general life success, whereas maladaptive abstainers only fare better than delinquent adolescents in terms of lower substance use and delinquency later in life.
Research Centre Adolescent Development, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS, Utrecht, The Netherlands. n.c.mercer@uu.nl.
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Mercer
Cambridge Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
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Farrington
Cambridge Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
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Ttofi
Research Centre Adolescent Development, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
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Keijsers
Research Centre Adolescent Development, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
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Branje
Research Centre Adolescent Development, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS, Utrecht, The Netherlands.|Department of Developmental Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
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Meeus
D000124:Achievement; D000293:Adolescent; D000987:Antisocial Personality Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D004522:Educational Status; D006801:Humans; D007604:Juvenile Delinquency / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D012307:Risk Factors; D012919:Social Behavior; D012927:Social Control, Informal
Abstainers; Adolescence; Delinquency; Developmental taxonomy; Life success; Social control