Role-Taking, Interaction, and the Dynamics of Delinquency

本研究通过具体说明和检验犯罪行为的结构互动理论，探讨了家庭、同伴和犯罪之间的关系。 这个视角中的关键过程是角色扮演，即群体控制个人行为的机制，从而将社会结构与个人行为联系起来。 角色扮演或反思性评估的概念被付诸实践，并用于帮助解释父母、同伴和老师如何影响青少年的道德和非法行为。 传统理论的因果机制被证明是结构相互作用主义观点的特例；这种嵌套结构提供了一种根据竞争性解释来测试所提出的理论的方法。 实证分析的数据来自 1976-1980 年全国青少年调查，这是一个针对全国 11-17 岁青少年样本收集的纵向数据集。 指定、估计和测试了两种模型，每种模型都包含角色扮演、差异关联和社会控制的过程。 第一种，传统的犯罪面板模型将个人视为分析单位，并试图解释犯罪行为在不同人之间以及随时间的变化。 第二种是犯罪的家庭模型，将兄弟姐妹作为分析单位，并试图解释兄弟姐妹之间犯罪行为的共同变异（协变）以及不同兄弟姐妹之间犯罪行为的差异。

This study examines the relationships among families, peers, and delinquency by specifying and testing a structural-interactionist theory of delinquent behavior. The key process within this perspective is role taking, the mechanism by which groups control the behavior of individuals, and which, consequently, links social structure to individual action. The concept of role taking or reflective appraisal is operationalized and used to help explain how parents, peers and teachers influence the moral and unlawful behavior of adolescents. The causal mechanisms of conventional theories, are shown to be special cases of a structural-interactionist perspective; this nested structure provides a way of testing the proposed theory against competing explanations. Data for the empirical analysis come from the 1976-1980 National Youth Survey, a longitudinal dataset collected on a national sample of adolescents, aged 11-17. Two kinds of models, each incorporating the processes of roletaking, differential association, and social control, are specified, estimated, and tested. The first, a conventional panel model of delinquency treats the individual as the unit of analysis, and seeks to explain variation in delinquency across persons and over time. The second, a family model of delinquency, treats the sibling pair as the unit of analysis, and attempts to account for both the common variation (covariation) in delinquent behavior for pairs of siblings as well as the variation in delinquent behavior across different pairs of siblings.