Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p14411"
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(2015)Study aims. Crime behaviour can be influenced by individual characteristics such as lack of impulse control or social factors such as loose social controls. What the main risk factors for crime are can vary between different contexts. The causes of crime can also differ in adolescence when many people experiment with crime as compared to in adulthood. The primary aim of this study was to compare the effects of family risk factors and personality on juvenile crime in Finland. The expectation was that in the individualistic Finnish context personality would have a larger impact on youth's crime behaviour than family risk factors. The second aim of the study was to assess whether the impact of family risk factors on delinquency was partially mediated by personality. Methods. The study data was from a Finnish cross-sectional self-report survey on youth crime collected in Spring 2012. The sample consisted of 4059 Year 6 students from 102 primary schools and 4855 Year 9 students from 51 secondary schools. Personality was measured using an abbreviated Finnish version of the original Big Five Inventory of personality (BFI-S). Delinquency was measured through self-reports of crimes committed in the previous year and included 12 varied offences including eg. graffiti, theft, burglary and battery. Family risk was assessed using a cumulative measure of five risk factors; parental unemployment, large family size, subjective ratings of poor financial situation, being from a divorced family and immigrant status. Results and discussion. After adjusting for gender and school year group both cumulative family risk and personality, apart from the dimension of Neuroticism, were found to be significant predictors of delinquency. As hypothesized, personality had a larger effect on delinquency than cumulative family risk. However, including both personality and cumulative family risk in a model predicting delinquency produced the best predictive power. Agreeableness and Conscientiousness were linked with decreased delinquency, whereas Extroversion and Openness to experience were linked with increased delinquency. Personality also partially mediated the effect of cumulative family risk on delinquency. The results of the mediator analyses suggest that the family risk factors may have increased personality dispositions to react in a certain way, which in turn added the risk of participating in criminal behaviour or protected youth from reacting through delinquency.
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(2014)Objectives: Juvenile delinquency and substance use are significant social problems. Delinquency and substance use started in adolescence often lead to lifetime persistent behavior patterns. According to previous research the most important individual factor in relation to juvenile delinquency and substance use is personality and one of the most important environmental factors in relation to these behaviors is parental monitoring. In this study I tried to replicate earlier results on the links of personality and parental monitoring with juvenile delinquency and substance use. Moreover I examined the quality of interactions between the Big Five personality traits and parental monitoring in relation to juvenile delinquency and substance use; these interactions have not been studied comprehensively before. Methods: Data for this study was taken from the Finnish national delinquency survey from 2012 collected by the National Research Institute of Legal Policy. The sample consisted of 8914 Finnish 6th and 9th grade pupils (age range 12–17). I analyzed the amount of self-reported criminal acts from the previous year in three classes of crime: aggressive and non-aggressive criminal acts as well as substance use (incl. alcohol use). I used multinomial logistic regression to examine the links of the Big Five personality dimensions, parental monitoring and their interactions to different classes of criminal acts. In each class of crime I compared separately occasional and repetitive offenders to those who reported minimal amounts of criminal acts. Results and conclusions: Parental monitoring had strong positive links to all classes of crime independent of the amount of criminal acts. Agreeableness and conscientiousness had negative relationships with all criminal behavior following previous research. Extraversion in turn had positive relations to all crime contrary to many previous results. Personality traits and parental monitoring had two separate kinds of interactions: in many occasions when parental monitoring was lower some personality trait was reduced in its power to predict criminal acts; contrary to this the positive relationship of extraversion to repetitive aggressive crime raised as parental monitoring decreased in amount. The significance of parental monitoring in relation to juvenile delinquency and substance use is highlighted in my results. According to my results it will be profitable to put effort in reinforcing parental monitoring to fight juvenile delinquency and substance use.
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