Conjunctive Analysis Of Case Configurations Research Articles

Exploring the Situational Contexts of Traditional Bullying Perpetration: A Social Bonding Theory Perspective

ABSTRACT Utilizing data from the 2022 Minnesota Student Survey (N = 131, 751), this study employs conjunctive analysis of case configurations to explore traditional adolescent bullying perpetration from a social bonding perspective. Measures of attachment, commitment, belief, and involvement are used to create contextual profiles of traditional bullying perpetration, which are examined to improve our empirical understanding of a) the extent to which traditional bullying perpetration clusters within a small subset of dominant situational profiles; b) the dominant profiles most (and least) likely lead to bullying perpetration; and c) the social bonding theory concepts that predict bullying perpetration across dominant case configurations.

Exploring the Situational Contexts of Heterosexual and Sexual Minority Adolescent Suicidality: A Partial Test of Minority Stress Theory

Data from the 2019 Minnesota Student Survey, consisting of 166,176 students ranging in age from 10 to 18 years, were used to investigate patterns of adolescent suicidal ideation and attempt through the lens of Minority Stress Theory (MST). Through a conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC), the current study demonstrates that adolescent suicidal ideation and attempt cluster significantly among specific situational profiles defined by the unique combination of variable attributes. Students most likely to indicate suicidal ideation were generally sexual minority females in high school who experienced cyberbullying, parental abuse, dating violence, and sexual abuse. Students least likely to report suicidal ideation were generally non-sexual minorities in elementary school who nearly never experienced parental abuse, dating violence, or sexual abuse. Results regarding adolescent suicide attempt indicate analogous results. The current findings highlight the importance of furthering research on contextual predictors of adolescent suicidality, with particular emphasis on sexual minority adolescents.

An Examination of the Intersectional Experience of Incarcerated Parents

ABSTRACTData from the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities, consisting of 9,262 incarcerated parents, were used to explore patterns of anger, with a particular focus on understanding the interplay between emotional distress and other predictors of anger among incarcerated parents through the lens of General Strain Theory. Through a conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC), results from the current study show that 1) reports of anger cluster moderately among specific situational profiles, which are defined by the unique combination of variable attributes; 2) incarcerated parents most likely to report anger have consistently reported emotional distress, but incarcerated parents least likely to report anger rarely described emotional distress; and 3) incarcerated parents who report emotional distress can increase their chances of reported anger by as much as 12% in some situational contexts, but can have almost no influence on feelings of anger in others. Current findings are discussed considering existing scholarship on the well-being of incarcerated parents and recommendations for policy and future areas of research are offered.

Contextualizing Adolescent Suicidality: Using Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations to Identify Patterns in Variability

Contextualizing Adolescent Suicidality: Using Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations to Identify Patterns in Variability

‘Till death do us part’: An integrated multi-theoretical approach to identify predictors of intimate partner homicide

This research aims to explore the factors associated with a lethal outcome in cases of intimate partner violence. We used four hypotheses – offender characteristics, victim vulnerabilities, environmental context, and crime escalation – to theoretically frame this study. The sample used in this study consists of 1485 cases of attempted or completed intimate partner homicide that occurred in the province of Quebec, Canada. Bivariate analysis as well as sequential binary regressions and conjunctive analysis of case configurations were computed. Findings showed that all four of these hypotheses were valid in explaining the lethal outcome of IPV, and they interacted with each other in complex ways. Results also revealed that the overall theoretical pattern held true, but there were some specific differences. From a theoretical standpoint, this study offers an initial empirical examination of the role and interplay of different theoretical approaches in explaining cases of completed intimate partner homicide.

Applying GST to Understand and Contextualize Bullying: A Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations.

Drawing from Agnew's general strain theory, this study examines whether certain risk factors have a consistent effect across different situational contexts that characterize bullying perpetration. A conjunctive analysis of case configurations was conducted to examine and identify situational factors that increase adolescents' risks for bullying perpetration using data from the 2019 Minnesota Student Survey. Results from a sample of 166,176 U.S. adolescents show that (1) incidents of traditional bullying perpetration cluster significantly among dominant situational profiles; (2) students most likely to be bullies experience victimization, but students least likely to bully their peers rarely experience bullying victimization; and (3) being a victim of traditional bullying can increase the chances of traditional bullying perpetration in some situational contexts, but can have almost no influence on perpetration in other contexts. Current findings are discussed considering existing bullying scholarship and recommendations for policy and future areas of research are presented.

Theft Victimization in Urban Settings: Comparison of Tourist and Resident Case Profiles

The relationship between urban tourism and crime has been well documented, although a focus on the specifics of tourist victimization is lacking. This study explores police-recorded thefts against urban tourists in the city of Barcelona (Spain). We apply Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations to a large data sample to uncover victimization case profiles and the context in which crimes are committed. Comparisons to resident victimization reveal that the case profiles most likely to result in a tourist being the victim of theft have predominantly female, young targets, and occur mostly at restaurants/bars and during the Summer. Future research should examine victimization trends while accounting for time spent in different settings, and compare self-protective behaviors taken by tourists and residents.

Old crimes reported in new bottles: the disclosure of child sexual abuse on Twitter through the case #MeTooInceste

Movements such as #MeToo have shown how an online trend can become the vehicle for collectively sharing personal experiences of sexual victimisation that often remains unreported to the criminal justice system. These social media trends offer new opportunities to social scientists who investigate complex phenomena that, despite existing since time immemorial, are still taboo and difficult to access. They also bring technical difficulties, as the challenge to identify reports of victimisation, and new questions about the characteristic of the events, the role that victimisation testimonies play and the capacity to detect them by analysing their characteristics. To address these issues, we collected 91,501 tweets under the hashtag #MeTooInceste, posted from the 20 to 27 January 2021. A model was fitted using Latent Dirichlet Allocation that detected 1688 tweets disclosing experiences of child sexual abuse, with an accuracy of 91.3% [± 3%] and a recall of 93.1% [± 5%]. We performed Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations on the tweets identified as disclosures of victimisation and found that long tweets posted by users with small accounts, without URL or picture, were more likely to be related to disclosure of child sexual abuse. We discuss the possibilities of these trends and techniques offer for research and practice.

A conjunctive analysis of false accusations, official misconduct, and race in violent and sexual exonerations cases.

The National Registry of Exonerations tracks cases of individuals who have been convicted and exonerated in the United States since 1989. The objective of the current study was to explore the misconduct patterns in violent and sexual offense cases using a novel method with a focus on cases where suspects were falsely accused, either deliberately or by mistaken witness identification. A conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC) was conducted using 1690 males convicted of murder/manslaughter, rape/sexual assault, and child sexual abuse. The results showed that compared to Whites, Blacks had a disproportionate amount of official misconduct in both sexual and non-sexual homicide cases. Blacks also had a disproportionate amount of misconduct by multiple actors and multiple types. Blacks had more cases of mistaken witness identification and a disproportionate amount of official misconduct in sexual assault cases. Implications and recommendations are discussed.

Contextualizing Adolescent Bullying: The Overlap Between Victimization and Perpetration

This study used data from 2019 Minnesota Student Survey to explore patterns of traditional bullying perpetration. Using conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC), results from a sample of 166,351 students show that (1) incidents of traditional bullying perpetration cluster significantly among dominant situational profiles; (2) students most likely to be bullies experience victimization, but students least likely to bully their peers rarely experience bullying victimization; and (3) being a victim of traditional bullying can increase the chances of traditional bullying perpetration by as much as 100% in some situational contexts, but can have almost no influence on perpetration in other contexts. Current findings are discussed considering existing bullying scholarship and recommendations for policy and future areas of research are presented.

CACC: Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations

CACC: Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations

Contextualising mass school shootings in the United States

AbstractThe data from the K‐12 School Shooting Database (K‐12 SSDB) of 1,544 school shootings were used to explore patterns of mass school shootings in the United States, with particular focus on the interplay between relevant predictors of these tragic events. Through a conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC), results from the current study show that (1) mass school shootings are rare and cluster significantly among dominant situational profiles, defined by the unique combination of variables attributes; (2) mass school shootings are never pre‐planned and in no case involve hostages. Current findings are discussed in light of existing school shooting scholarship and recommendations for policy and future areas of research are offered.

Scripting police escalation of use of force through conjunctive analysis of body-worn camera footage: A systematic social observational pilot study

PurposeTo date script analysis has not been used in the field of criminology to further understand processes behind events involving non-offending criminal justice system actors. The purpose of this research is to conduct a pilot study to develop a police officer force escalation script. MethodsThrough the systematic social observation video data analysis of police-worn body camera footage, conjunctive analysis of case configurations is applied to develop force escalation scripts. ResultsScripts consist of dominant officer and subject action configurations associated with an increased risk of escalation from soft empty-hand control to more severe types of force, as well as configurations of environmental and demographic characteristics. ConclusionsBased on identified scripts, if study results are replicated using a larger sample size, results support the efficacy of persistent calm commands for reducing risk of escalation. Crisis intervention and procedural justice training is recommended for officers. To create a heightened awareness of the presence of a recording device, wearers of BWCs may consider narrating interactions as they unfold. Finally, pending replication, we advocate for immediate physical separation of victim and suspect when in a private space.

Discovering significant situational profiles of crime occurrence by modeling complex spatial interactions

The joint influence of different facilities plays an important role in understanding situational profiles of crime incidents. While spatial conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC) is widely used to explore situational profiles of crime, complex spatial interactions (e.g., spatial autocorrelation of crime incidents, spatial interactions among multiple facilities) have not been fully considered. Drawing on previous environmental criminology research, this study extends the CACC by modeling complex spatial interactions between crime and facilities. First, the spatial interaction range between single facility and crime incidents is quantitatively measured by the cross-type pair-correlation function. Then, the relationship between different situational profiles is modeled, and a “bottom-up” strategy is applied to generate potential situational profiles. Finally, significant situational profiles are selected via Monte Carlo testing by modeling the complex structure of crime incidents. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated by both a synthetic and real dataset. The experimental result manifests that the proposed approach can effectively eliminate the influence of independent facilities and more accurately identify those significant situation profiles. The discovered significant situational profiles have a positive guiding effect in understanding the spatial context for crime occurrence, thereby facilitating crime prevention.

Hunter or Prey? Exploring the Situational Profiles that Define Repeated Online Harassment Victims and Offenders

ABSTRACT Data collected from a sample of Spanish non-university students (N = 4174) were used to identify unique situational profiles of self-identified repeated online harassment victims and offenders, through a Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations (CACC). Repeat victim and offender profiles were constructed using individual-level factors and variables related to the cyber “places” where students go online and their personal information they share while there. Clustering analysis demonstrates that students spent their time online in few situational contexts where online harassment occurs. Dominant situational profiles of students are then provided, along with their associated probabilities for experiencing repeat victimization or committing repeat offending, identifying those at relatively higher and lower risk. Results show that composite profiles associated with victims of repeated online harassment are dissimilar to those associated with offenders of repeated online harassment, suggesting that each form of online harassment occurs in different situational contexts and therefore requires different preventative measures. Our findings are discussed in terms of criminological theory, future online harassment research, cybercrime prevention, and policy implications.

Discovering the joint influence of urban facilities on crime occurrence using spatial co-location pattern mining

The presence or absence of some urban facilities can shape the spatial distribution of crime occurrence. Exploring the joint influence of various types of facilities on crime occurrence has been a major concern for both crime prevention and urban planning. Previous research (e.g., the spatial conjunctive analysis of case configurations) have tried to ascertain the joint influence of facilities by identifying the frequent spatial configurations (combinations of facility types) that exist near criminal incidents. However, such a method neglects the prevalence of facilities and the spatial autocorrelation of crime occurrence, thus resulting in some spurious conclusions. To resolve this problem, borrowing methods from spatial pattern recognition and ecology, this study applied the spatial co-location pattern mining and pattern reconstruction approach to identify statistically significant spatial configurations for crime occurrence. The results show that the adopted approach effectively eliminates the influence of independent facility types with abundant instances, thus revealing statistically significant spatial configurations with better accuracy. These identified high-risk spatial configurations both confirm and expand on previous research; these configurations can also make a positive contribution to crime prevention and urban planning.

Identifying Situational Clustering and Quantifying Its Magnitude in Dominant Case Configurations: New Methods for Conjunctive Analysis

Steps for conducting Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations (CACC) are well documented in the literature; however, methods for identifying and quantifying “situational clustering” vary and are often based on subjective interpretation of a CACC truth table. In response, the current article presents two new techniques that (a) enable researchers to determine whether data used to populate a truth table cluster significantly within dominant case configurations and (b) apply an established metric from the economics literature and modified for configural analysis to quantify its relative magnitude. These new methods are applied to four existing CACC studies, demonstrating how they offer a more systematic, transparent, and replicable approach to analyzing and interpreting case configurations than what is currently used.

The Situated Contexts of American Terrorism: A Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations

This study examines how combinations of situational factors are associated with patterns of terrorist success and failure. We apply Sacco and Kennedy’s criminal event perspective and Clarke and Newman’s situational crime prevention approach to the study of terrorist opportunity structures. Using data from the American Terrorism Study (ATS), we employ conjunctive analysis to investigate how opportunities for terrorist attacks and prevention are situationally positioned. We ask, “What combinations of terrorists’ ideological and situational factors are associated with terrorist outcomes in the United States?” While our findings generally show that the simplest forms of terrorism, including combinations of lone actors using unsophisticated weapons against nonhuman targets after little preparation, are associated with successful outcomes, there is heterogeneity in situated opportunities for preparing for and committing terrorism across terrorism movements. Our findings add insights into terrorism prevention strategies and help build a foundation for future comparative research on terrorism outcomes.

Using Conjunctive Methods to Explore Factors Associated with On-Time Grade Attainment Among High Risk Youth

This study examines risk and protective factors associated with on-time grade attainment among a cohort of high risk elementary age youth 3 years post truancy intervention. Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations was used to identify dominant subpopulation profiles and assess distinctions in the likelihood of on-time grade completion among groups with unique combinations of characteristics. Comparisons of subpopulation profiles revealed substantial contextual variability in the influence of race, gender, service completion, psychosocial risk factors, and truancy. Findings indicate race is not influential across all grades but appears to be dependent on truancy level. Although psychosocial risk factors are not present for K-3rd profiles, they are critical among 4-5th graders, specifically lack of motivation. Findings from this study allow practitioners to better understand risk and protective factors influencing grade progression and aids in the development of individualized case management and intervention. Findings indicate better policies are needed to address early truancy.

Risk factor and high-risk place variations across different robbery targets in Denver, Colorado

PurposeRisk Terrain Modeling (RTM) has been effectively used to spatially diagnose risk for crimes such as robbery, aggravated assault, and gun violence. An important contribution is to consider how risk differs across individual crimes and different target types. This study tests four different robbery target types in unique models to examine the potential for variation across significant risk factors and high-risk locations. MethodsUsing the online diagnostic software RTMDx, individual robbery models were run for four robbery target types in Denver, Colorado: commercial (businesses), carjacking (driver/vehicle), residential (home/dwelling), and street (pedestrians). A conjunctive analysis of case configurations was also conducted to determine the potential for spatial differences in high-risk places across target types. ResultsThe results indicate that there is variation across risk factors, and observable differences in risk factor spatial influence, operationalization and relative risk values in each target model. Convenience stores were the only risk factor significantly associated with every target type and the conjunctive analysis matrix found that very few places were high-risk for all four robbery types. ConclusionsThe findings suggest different target types should be analyzed individually and interventions should focus on different high-risk locations and be tailored to specific target types.