Criminal offending, alcohol and drug use and victimization among teenagers remain pressing problems worldwide. A large number of different policies and programs targeting these youth problems exist and research supports the idea that such programs work best if they have a sound theoretical basis. While there are numerous theories focused on youth problems, recent thinking suggests there is a need for an integrated approach, combining individual, situational and macro-level theories. The first goal of the current study is to collect survey data on 3,600 7th, 8th and 9th graders in 4 US cities in order to develop and test such integrated theory.
At the same time, youth crime and victimization is a problem for many countries. Studying national and local youth policies and programs sheds light on why some countries have less serious youth-related problems than others. Therefore, the second goal of the study is to compare the experiences of American adolescents with those in the UK, France, Germany and The Netherlands to determine whether the same theories apply across countries, and to provide a comparative analysis of youth-related crime policies. Primary focus is on comparison between US, UK, Germany, France and The Netherlands, but analyses will also include 25 other countries which are part of the larger International Self-Report Delinquency (ISRD) study which collects self-administered surveys among random samples of 7th, 8th and 9th graders. All countries use the same research design, making results comparable. Information on youth policies will be collected through interviews with experts and open source documents. National data will be merged into an international data base for joint analysis and for the preparation of academic and policy papers, in the US and abroad.
In terms of broader impacts, the five "Understanding and Preventing Youth Crime" countries will assemble comprehensive information on the organisation of youth justice at the country-level in order to provide a comparative analysis of youth justice policies and structures, to set against the findings from the UPYC survey. The study will contribute to the development of an integrated theory of youth offending, and will trace the implications of this for youth justice policy. The project will have a broader impact by potentially improving youth policies which better the well-being of teenagers in general.
