Juvenile Crime Causal Factors

Ebony Dickens
Causal Factors of Juvenile Delinquency: A Proposed Study
Research Methods
Grand Canyon University
December 21, 2011Introduction Juvenile delinquency, despite falling overall rates of crime in the United States, remains a serious problem in this country. Around 2.5 million juveniles are arrested every year for various crimes in America, of which around 100,000 are violent crimes; however, it is estimated that this issue may be much larger than arrests show, because only about half of all crimes involving juveniles are even reported (Juvenile Justice Basic Statistics, 2011). Juvenile involvement in violent crimes has remained roughly constant for the past two decades, and they form a significant percentage of many other
A balance must be struck among attributing behavior to specific causes, however; strong causal designs of intervention programs can risk unsuccessful or uncertain program outcomes, although weak causal reasoning cannot be adopted to practical use and the creation of interventions (Borowski, 2003). Previous theories have attempted to occasionally describe juvenile delinquency as being attributable to a single causal factor, such as poverty and social disorganization in neighborhoods from an external standpoint, or more proximal causes such as problematic peer influences or ego deficiency (Borowski, 2003). Newer models, however, generally take the approach that this behavior is due to “a large number of factors operating at different levels,” which include both proximal and distal factors. It is from this perspective that the current study will operate, as it is difficult to attribute juvenile delinquency, which can take many forms, to a single factor that invariably serves as a cause in all
This type of analysis is generally used by studies investigating the potential for multiple causes behind juvenile delinquency, as it allows the researcher to determine the correlations between individual independent variables that serve as predictive or causal factors, as well as the dependent variable of juvenile delinquency (Farrington et al., 2002; Van Hulle et al., 2007). Additionally, it can also show between-group differences easily, by averaging correlations between groups of students based on neighborhood, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and other variables, and comparing them. Within-group correlations can also be seen by testing the distribution of certain correlations, their skew, mean, and curve shape when the correlations are plotted. Contact information will be collected from participants and updated annually as well, so that a follow-up study could be performed some years later to determine how potential changes in independent variables could correlate with changes in delinquency, or, as the case may be, adult criminal behavior, which would strengthen the power of within-group