Social Bonding, Early School Leaving, and Delinquency

Traag Tanja, Olivier Marie () and Rolf Van der Velden ()

No 14, Research Memoranda from Maastricht : ROA, Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market

Abstract: In this paper we investigate how successful social bonding theory is at predicting juveniledelinquency and school dropout behaviour. We adopt a simple dynamic approach whichassumes that past involvement in risky behaviour reduces individual restraints forfuture participation in risky behaviour. We use a ten years education panel followingDutch adolescents who participated in a survey in their first year of high school in 1999.This information was matched to annual information on police arrests based on registrydata. Our results show that school performance (as measured by test scores) is the keysocial bond element preventing young people from engaging in risk behaviour. We alsofind that involvement in past risky behaviour increases the likelihood of future misstepsand that the protective influence of school performance is mitigated.

Keywords: labour market entry and occupational careers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (2) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://edocs.ub.unimaas.nl/loader/file.asp?id=1570 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Social Bonding, Early School Leaving, and Delinquency (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dgr:umaror:2010014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Memoranda from Maastricht : ROA, Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market
Series data maintained by Charles Bollen ().