Criminal Thought Content and Criminal Thought Process as Mediators of Peer Influence

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine whether measures of criminal thought content and criminal thought process are capable of mediating the peer influence effect. Participants were all 1,725 (918 boys and 807 girls) members of the National Youth Survey. The average age of the participants was 13.87 years at initial contact. In this study, attitudes toward deviance served as a measure of criminal thought content, proactive criminal thinking served as a measure of criminal thought process, and the lagged delinquent peers–offending relationship marked the peer influence effect. Path analysis was conducted with structured equation modeling and demonstrated that criminal thought content and criminal thought process, both individually and conjointly, mediated the peer influence effect. There was no evidence that these effects were moderated by gender. A principal implication of these results is that criminal thought content and criminal thought process are both instrumental in mediating the effect of peer deviance on participant delinquency. In addition, criminal thought content and criminal thought process appear to be learned through association with deviant peers while providing nonredundant and largely additive variance to predictions of subsequent offending via their ability to link prior delinquent peer associations to future offending behavior.