Abstract
Adolescent violence and delinquency continue to be major societal and public health problems as reflected in the occurrences of school shootings, cyberstalking, teenage cruelty, and other types of crime. Thus, there have been calls for a more nuanced understanding of the complex problem of youth delinquency in contemporary society and, in particular, accounting better for the role of individual agency. This study draws from the hot/cool perspective of criminal decision-making and the Situational Action Theory and extends their main premises by focusing on a variety of enduring individual and contextual effects on adolescent crime. To address these interrelationships, this dissertation uses novel data collected from adolescents in several U.S. areas in 2014-2017 (ISRD3) and data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as well as supplemental data from the US Census and American Community Survey. It employs negative binomial regression and multi-level overdispersed Poisson regression to assess individual-level and multi-level effects on youth crime, respectively. The individual-level analyses address the role of cool/rational-logical factors (i.e., rational thinking) and different hot/normative-affective triggers (i.e., factors empowering affective and nonvolitional responses) in predicting youth crime. In particular, a variety of cool factors (i.e., perceptions of crime benefits and sanctions, self-control, and thoughtfully reflective decision-making) are found to be associated with contemporary youth criminal involvement. In addition, hot triggers such as straining conditions, positive and negative emotions, alcohol use, and morality are also shown to influence different types of adolescent delinquency. Moreover, while certain normative-affective factors (i.e., strain and alcohol use) decrease the crime protective effects of several rational-logical factors, others (i.e., positive emotions and morality) amplify the crime-reducing impact of certain cool factors. Further, the multi-level part of this dissertation contextualizes youth agency and focuses on the effects of several school characteristics including school moral, sanctioning, and thoughtfully reflective climates as well as individual criminal propensity (i.e., morality and self-control) on delinquency. The results from these analyses show that, while the school context does not directly affect youth delinquency, school moral, sanctioning, and thoughtfully reflective climates have stronger effects on crime among adolescents with lower criminal propensity suggesting that adolescents might not benefit from their environments equally. Notably, whereas, overall, the findings indicate a potentially more salient influence of the school environment as compared to other social contexts such as the surrounding school neighborhood, the results from additional analyses suggest that more complex macro-micro level mechanisms might be at play. Taken together, the findings of this dissertation suggest the need to move towards an integrated theory of juvenile criminal behavior with a more nuanced understanding of the interrelationships between different aspects of individual agency and contextual dynamics. Finally, this study provides recommendations for novel juvenile justice policies and programs focused on youth crime prevention.