Determining the Effects of Neighborhood Peer and Family

PROJECT SUMMARY FOR GRANT 1999-IJ-CX-0035

The proposed project will conduct a re-analysis of data of the Racine, Wisconsin 1942 and 1949 Birth Cohorts to examine the impact of social environment on individuals' trajectories of offending. The goals of the project are to: (1) plot the age trajectories of offenders in the Racine Birth Cohorts across ages 8-25; (2) determine the relative effect that community/neighborhood context, peer groups, and families have on delinquent/criminal offending trajectories; and (3) determine the potentially differing effects that various social contexts have upon male and female offenders. The project will use a recently developed statistical tool of semiparametric mixed Poisson regression modeling (Land, McCall, and Nagin 1996; Land and Naigin 1996) in order to determine the optimal categories of offenders which can be found in the Racine data as a whole, as well as among male and female only samples. Components of criminal career trajectory (e.g., age of onset, peak age, peak rate of offending) and the differential effect of contextual measures will be compared across offender classes so that the empirical veracity of hypotheses drawn from life-course theory can be evaluated.