Intergenerational transmission of criminal and violent behaviour

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree', 'Like father like son', 'Chip off the old block'. All these idioms seem to suggest that offspring resemble their parents and this also applies to criminal behaviour. This dissertation investigates mechanisms that might explain why children with criminal parents have a higher risk of committing crime. Several explanations for this intergenerational transmission have been contrasted, such as social learning (imitation of behaviour), official bias against certain families, and transmission of risk factors. Sytske Besemer investigated this in England as well as in the Netherlands. She answers questions such as: does it matter when the parents committed crime in the child's life? Do more persistent offenders transmit crime more than sporadic offenders? Do violent offenders specifically transmit violent behaviour or general crime to their children? Might the police and courts be biased against certain families? Could a deprived environment explain why parents as well as children show criminal behaviour? Does parental imprisonment pose an extra risk? This dissertation is the first study to specifically investigate these mechanisms of intergenerational continuity. The study is scientifically relevant because of its breadth, integration of conviction data as well as data on self-reported offending and environmental risk factors, its comparative design and the long periods over which transmission is investigated. Furthermore, the dissertation has important policy implications. It demonstrates how penal policy designed to reduce criminal behaviour might actually increase this behaviour in the next generation. This is especially important since Western countries such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands show an increasing trend towards more punitive policies

Bidirectional Associations Between Externalizing Behavior Problems and Maladaptive Parenting Within Parent-Son Dyads Across Childhood

Coercive parent-child interaction models posit that an escalating cycle of negative, bidirectional interchanges influences the development of boys' externalizing problems and caregivers' maladaptive parenting over time. However, longitudinal studies examining this hypothesis have been unable to rule out the possibility that between-individual factors account for bidirectional associations between child externalizing problems and maladaptive parenting. Using a longitudinal sample of boys (N = 503) repeatedly assessed eight times across 6-month intervals in childhood (in a range between 6 and 13 years), the current study is the first to use novel within-individual change (fixed effects) models to examine whether parents tend to increase their use of maladaptive parenting strategies following an increase in their son's externalizing problems, or vice versa. These bidirectional associations were examined using multiple facets of externalizing problems (i.e., interpersonal callousness, conduct and oppositional defiant problems, hyperactivity/impulsivity) and parenting behaviors (i.e., physical punishment, involvement, parent-child communication). Analyses failed to support the notion that when boys increase their typical level of problem behaviors, their parents show an increase in their typical level of maladaptive parenting across the subsequent 6 month period, and vice versa. Instead, across 6-month intervals, within parent-son dyads, changes in maladaptive parenting and child externalizing problems waxed and waned in concert. Fixed effects models to address the topic of bidirectional relations between parent and child behavior are severely underrepresented. We recommend that other researchers who have found significant bidirectional parent-child associations using rank-order change models reexamine their data to determine whether these findings hold when examining changes within parent-child dyads

The relationship between quantity, type and timing of external childcare and child problem behaviour in Switzerland

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between external childcare and child problem behaviour at age 7 in a culturally diverse urban sample from Switzerland. We used data from the Zurich Project on the Social Development of Children and Youths (z-proso). Findings suggested that the quantity of group-based childcare (but not individual childcare) was related to aggression, ADHD, non-aggressive externalizing behaviour, and anxiety and depression at age 7. Analyses on timing of childcare suggested that the accumulation of childcare over the life course, and not so much childcare in the first years of life, was associated with child problem behaviour. In addition, childcare at age 5 to 7 had a unique relationship with problem behaviour over and above quantity of group-based childcare received in other age periods

Labeling and intergenerational transmission of crime: The interaction between criminal justice intervention and a convicted parent.

Labeling theory suggests that criminal justice interventions amplify offending behavior. Theories of intergenerational transmission suggest why children of convicted parents have a higher risk of offending. This paper combines these two perspectives and investigates whether labeling effects might be stronger for children of convicted parents. We first investigated labeling effects within the individual: we examined the impact of a conviction between ages 19-26 on self-reported offending behavior between 27-32 while controlling for self-reported behavior between 15-18. Our results show that a conviction predicted someone's later self-reported offending behavior, even when previous offending behavior was taken into account. Second, we investigated whether having a convicted parent influenced this association. When we added this interaction to the analysis, a labeling effect was only visible among people with convicted parents. This supports the idea of cumulative disadvantage: Labeling seems stronger for people who are already in a disadvantaged situation having a convicted parent

The Event History Calendar as an Instrument for Longitudinal Criminological Research

Event History Calendars (EHCs) arc data collection instruments used to elicit and record time-ordered data about events in people's lives. In essence they consist of a graphical time frame with a number of timelines, arranged in a grid, that comprise data-entry cells to record and code events. This paper reports findings on using an EHC in a longitudinal study on child aggressive and non-aggressive problem behaviour. The calendar was administered to the primary caregivers to collect data on the period between the child's birth and age 7, the first wave of a longitudinal study conducted with 1,200 children in the City of Zurich. Using current knowledge about the role of early family-related and individual risk factors as a benchmark, the study examines whether event history data predict aggressive and non-aggressive problem behaviours in the expected size-order and direction. More specifically, we distinguish three aspects of criterion-related validity: The analyses show that risk-factors measured in the calendar are correlated with behaviour outcomes in the expected direction, that the size-order and relative importance of early risk factors are in line with the previous literature, that longer exposure to a risk factor is associated with ail added risk, and that the likelihood of problematic outcomes is related to cumulative contextual risk