Juvenile Crime in Context : The Significance of School Affiliation

Within criminology, research on the school-crime relationship has been dominated by individual-level theories and methods. This thesis contributes to the relatively scarce literature focused on the socio-structural aspects of juvenile crime by applying a multidimensional approach to the urban school context of Stockholm. By combining contextual criminological theories of crime with a multilevel methodological approach, the overall aim of the thesis is to extend the empirical knowledge on the importance of school affiliation for involvement in crime among adolescents. Student and teacher survey data and register data on the student sociodemographic composition in schools are analyzed to explore whether and why levels of more serious forms of self-reported offending vary between schools. Although the three empirical studies included in this thesis have their own specific scopes and research questions, they are all concerned with juvenile crime as a contextual phenomenon, exploring whether serious offending varies between Stockholm schools, and the importance of the social context in relation to offending (Study I), how much of the school-level variation in offending can be ascribed to certain aspects of the structural and the social context of schools respectively (Study II), and whether certain individual-level associations differ depending on school type (Study III). In addition, Studies II and III also explore contextual associations between offending and both structural and social aspects of the school setting. The results contribute to advancing the understanding of the school-crime association by considering the classic sociological idea that social context shapes individual behavior. More specifically, the findings indicate that there are systematic differences in self-reported offending between Stockholm schools and that most of this variation can be explained by structural mechanisms related to student composition. Besides making visible the interrelationship between the structural and social context in relation to offending, the findings also show that some individual-level associations vary from one school setting to another. Several implications for theory and practice are discussed. For example, it is suggested that the structural context should not be ignored in attempts to understand the school-crime relationship. In addition, and in relation to this, it is argued that there is a need for a shift towards a more realistic view of schools as potential arenas for crime prevention