This dissertation advances the outstanding importance about the use of the quantitative methodology in order to study the variables that lead to recidivism among young offenders. The quantitative research in criminology has been scarce in Spain. Two reasons explain this fact. First the lack of exhaustive and on-going statistics data base, at the national level as in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Second the short tradition in social empiric transversal and longitudinal cohort studies.Methodologically, a distinction has been drawn between studies on judicial practice (files opened, offences committed, cautions, etc..) with young offenders and studies on juvenile delinquency and re-offending that rest more heavily upon the examinations and evaluation of young offenders carried out by the service professionals (psychologists and social workers), in the Juvenile Courts. This study belongs to this last category. The chief advantage coming from official records is that they provide thorough, unique information that can be used in analyses in many different ways Empirical studies on re-offending in the field of juvenile delinquency reflect the great complexity of the existing literature. Contradictory findings have been achieved due to differences in data collection and methodological problems (research design and statistical processing).Hence, the aim of this research is twofold. First, it intends to apply the Ordinal Logistic Regression, selecting the proportional odds model or cumulative logit model to demonstrate its utility. To accomplish this objective, the SPSS statistics module, that implements the Polytomic Universal Model is used. Second, it also seeks to determine the influence of psychological, behaviour, school, work and social variables on rates of recidivism in young offenders in order to advance a predictive integrated reliable model with internal and ecological validity. 6The sample consisted of 2369 young male offenders and 617 young female offenders, that is, a total of 2986 subjects, with ages ranging from 12 to 21 years. The mean is 15 years and 8 months and the standard deviation 15,12 months. The number of young offenders who had committed more than one offence accounted for 10,9% of the total sampleThe instrument used in this study is the Youth Assessment Report, drawn up by the service professionals in Castellón's Juvenile Court.The dependent variable is brought about by means of the "number of further offences committed". The cases of re-offending are a sequence of frequencies, which can be interpreted as an ordinal-type accumulative categorical scale.The independent variables are Gender, Age at the time of first offence, Poor social skills, Impulsiveness, Anxiety, Academic failure, Substance abuse and the interaction between Impulsiviness and Substance abuse.All of the single independent variables have statistical significance as they also do when integrated in a joint model that has internal and ecological validity reflected in the concordance between the empirical and predicted data.The...
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