cjrc-sponsored research

  • Project:
  • Growing Up in Diverse Neighborhoods and its Meaning for Offending in Early Adulthood

  • Investigator:
  • Harry E. Weiss (Sociology)

  • Abstract:
  • The diversity of communities has featured prominently in theories of social disorganization since Shaw and McKay noted higher rates of delinquency in neighborhoods that have higher proportions of African Americans and the foreign born. Social disorganization theorists subsequently made convincing arguments linking community diversity to social networks that are smaller and less developed than those in more homogeneous neighborhoods. This reduced networking, in turn, leads to lower overall social control through residents and a greater likelihood of unsupervised adolescents becoming delinquent. Beyond social control, there is also the possibility that growing up in a diverse community has long-term effects on offending once individuals become adults. Parental behaviors and associational membership patterns in the neighborhood one grows up in likely socialize adolescents to consider a certain amount of structured activities as normal and desirable. If such socialization is effective, when they grow up, individuals might be active in associations to the same extent as they were taught is normal. This study proposes that growing up in a diverse neighborhood socializes adolescents to a lower, for them normal, level of structured activity. As a consequence, the same adolescents, in early adulthood, engage in structured activities to a lesser extent and are therefore more likely to offend when compared with adolescents who grow up in more homogeneous environments.