Family relationships, self-control and delinquency: an empirical test of the General Theory of Crime.

Abstract

This master's research will occur in the scope of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study's fourth sweep (ISRD), the biggest collaborative and cross-cultural study about victimization and delinquency in adolescence. Considering the impact that the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency has in Brazil, identifying relevant variables associated to repeated commitment of crimes is scientifically and socially relevant. In particular, testing specific criminological theories consists in one of the most important scientific activities. However, besides the magnitude of delinquency and criminality phenomena in Brazil, applications of criminological knowledge are still scarce in the Brazilian context. So, the present study aims to test for the first time, in the Brazilian context, one of the most famous criminological theories - The General Theory of Crime (GTC). The research will focus on three topics included on the ISRD and directly related to GTC: family relationships, self-control (as a product of family socialization) and criminal behavior. Its main goals involve characterizing the association between family relationships, self-control levels and patterns of crime commitment (the infractional engagement patterns), as well as testing the GTC in the Brazilian sociocultural context. Therefore, the ISRD's research protocol will be adopted, what guarantee that the steps are standardized. The data collection is taking place in public and private schools from Ribeirão Preto and Sertãozinho (SP) and will count with 900 valid cases of adolescents from 13 to 17 years old for each city, totalizing 1800 participants. Through Survey Manager, schools and grades to be included in the data collection were randomly selected. First, it will be done a sociodemographic characterization of the sample and also concerning the topics of interest. Then, Pearson's correlation coefficient will be calculated between the numerical variables, for the general sample and for the sociodemographic strata. Next, an exploratory factor analysis will be done in order to determine the number of factors in the self-control scale. After determining a score on the self-control measure for each adolescent, it will be used the k-means agglomerative clustering and the groupings obtained will be characterized again. Finally, there will be done a multinomial regression analysis in order to verify differences between the groups in relation to the quality of family relationships and the frequency and diversity of criminal behaviors.