Hanging Out with the Wrong Crowd? The Role of Unstructured Socializing in Adolescents’ Specialization in Delinquency and Substance Use

Abstract

Despite abundant attention to offending specialization in criminology, scholars have only recently started to explore opportunity-driven explanations for within-individual patterns of specialization. The current study examines whether unstructured socializing with specific friends can explain within-individual changes in adolescents’ degree of specialization in delinquency and substance use. Data were derived from the PROSPER Peers Project, a longitudinal study consisting of five waves of data on 11,183 adolescents (aged 10 to 17). The data include self-reports about engagement in delinquency and substance use, sociometric information, and information on the time respondents reported spending in unstructured socializing with their nominated friends. Hypotheses were tested with negative binomial and binomial logit multilevel models. The findings indicate that involvement in unstructured socializing with friends who steal, vandalize, commit violence, use alcohol, use cigarettes, or use drugs enhances adolescents’ risks for engagement in those respective behaviors. Such activity affects adolescents’ quantitative engagement as well as their level of specialization in these behaviors. The study indicates that routine activity—in particular involvement in unstructured socializing—explains within-individual changes in deviance specialization among adolescents. Thus, exposure to opportunities can explain why adolescents specialize in certain types of delinquency and substance use in one time-period, and in other types of behavior in other time-periods. This adds a proximate explanation for this phenomenon to other explanations that focus on local life circumstances and peer group affiliation.