Adolescent Offending: How Growing Up Disadvantaged Matters Across Immigrant Generations

Poverty and disadvantage are typically associated with a variety of social problems, including adolescent offending. While poverty and disadvantage tend to increase adolescent offending, this does not appear true among foreign-born populations. Indeed, the foreign-born are less involved in offending than the native-born suggesting disadvantage is not a predictor of their offending. Although disadvantage may not be a direct cause of the foreign-born’s adolescent offending, this dissertation argues it may be consequential in previously unconsidered ways. This dissertation uses longitudinal data to examine two roles disadvantage may play in adolescent offending aside from a direct predictor – (1) an indirect cause mediated by more immediate causes of offending and (2) a moderator of the more immediate causes of offending. The overarching purpose of this dissertation, therefore, is to investigate how disadvantage affects adolescent offending across immigrant generations. Structural equation modeling assesses these two potential roles. Findings from the first two papers suggest different forms of disadvantage have distinct indirect consequences and those consequences vary by immigrant status (i.e., foreign born or native born) and by type of offending (i.e., violence or substance use). Results from the third paper indicate that residing in a disadvantaged neighbourhood changes the effects of some predictors on offending in distinct ways depending on immigrant generation (i.e., first, second, and third-plus generation). Taken together, this research demonstrates that disadvantage is, indeed, implicated in foreign-born adolescents’ offending as an indirect cause and as a moderator of the more immediate causes of offending. This research establishes that the ways in which disadvantage operates in these two roles varies by immigrant status, immigrant generation, and type of offending behaviour. The dissertation, therefore, offers insight into how disadvantage impacts adolescent offending across immigrant generations. As a whole, this dissertation demonstrates both the relevance of disadvantage for understanding offending and the heterogeneity of its consequences. This research challenges assumptions that all forms of disadvantage simply increase adolescent offending in a uniform and singular way.Ph.D