Predicting the Development of Juvenile Delinquency by Simulation

Abstract

A large number of delinquent activities are performed by adolescents and only occur during this period in their lives. One of the main factors that influence this behaviour is social interaction, mainly with peers. This paper contributes a computational model that predicts delinquent behaviour during adolescence based on interaction with friends and classmates. Based on the model, which was validated based on empirical data, the level of delinquency of pupils is simulated over time. Furthermore, simulation experiments are performed to investigate for hypothetical scenarios what is the impact of the division of students over classes on the (individual and collective) level of delinquency.

Effects of Classroom Composition on the Development of Antisocial Behavior in Lower Secondary School

“…() and Bosse et al. () are also very interesting in that they relate to what we consider the main research gap. Most existing studies investigated the effects of class composition among children but not among adolescents.…”

“…The few existing results concerning this issue are not conclusive. While a recent cross‐sectional study by Araos, Cea, Fernández, and Valenzuela () in Chile indicated that the level of marijuana use among the classmates was related to the individual rates of consumption among seventh graders, different results emerged from a study by Bosse, Gerritsen, and Klein (). Based on their data set of 194 seventh graders, these authors found little evidence of compositional effects but stressed the preliminary nature of their findings due to the small sample size and the incomplete information available on class composition.…”

“…Evidence concerning this issue is scarce, as most studies on early adolescence examined the impact of cliques or best friends (e.g., Berndt & Keefe, ; Espelage, Holt, & Henkel, ). Some relevant information is provided by the two studies described above (Araos et al., ; Bosse et al., ), and an analysis by the authors indicating that there are significant class composition effects on seventh graders’ school problem behaviors (Müller, Hofmann, Fleischli, & Studer, in press). Problem behaviors at school, as explored in this study, were narrowly defined as students’ norm violations in their interactions with their classroom teachers (e.g., not being attentive, standing up in class, not completing homework).…”

“…Further, in the local school system, adolescents remained within their self‐contained classes throughout almost all of their courses, so the classroom composition stayed the same across the entire school year. A common problem encountered in earlier studies was that compositional measures had to be based on the characteristics of only a segment of the students within a classroom (e.g., Bosse et al., ). Here, it was possible to collect data from nearly the entire student cohort from a specific region so that composition measures could be based on information from almost all of the students in a particular class.…”

An Overview of Classroom Composition Research on Social-Emotional Outcomes: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…However, there are also a few studies that did not find such classroom effects. For example, Henry et al (2000), in parts of their analyses, did not find evidence that classroom aggression affects individual aggressive behavior (see also e.g., Bosse, Gerritsen, & Klein, 2010). Other studies in research Area A did not predict individual social-emotional outcomes by the same characteristics of the classmates but used other classroom variables as predictors (e.g., Araos et al, 2014;Busching & Krahé, 2015;Henry et al, 2000;Hoglund & Leadbeater, 2004;Mercer et al, 2009;Stearns, Dodge, & Nicholson, 2008;Werthamer-Larsson, Kellam, & Wheeler, 1991).…”