 Developmental trajectories of nonsocial reinforcement and offending in adolescence and young adulthood: An exploratory study of an understudied part of social learning theoryGeorge E. Higgins, Wesley G. Jennings, Catherine D. Marcum, Melissa L. Ricketts and Margaret Mahoney Journal of Criminal Justice, 2011, vol. 39, issue 1, 60-66 Abstract: Purpose Within social learning theory, nonsocial reinforcement has been hypothesized to have a link with offending. The purpose of the present study was to address two questions: (1) Does nonsocial reinforcement change or remain stable over time? And (2) does nonsocial reinforcement have a reciprocal link with offending, as Wood et al. (1997) would expect?Methods We used a subsample (N = 413) of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data and semi-parametric group-based modeling (SPGM).Results and Conclusions The SPGM suggested three distinct groups of nonsocial reinforcement (one trajectory group appeared to have a low but stable rate of nonsocial reinforcement, one trajectory appeared to be higher but stable, another trajectory higher but also stable). A cross-tabulation of the nonsocial reinforcement trajectories and offending trajectories indicated that offending increased as nonsocial reinforcement became greater. Study limitations and implications are also discussed. Date: 2011 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jcjust:v:39:y::i:1:p:60-66 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Criminal Justice is currently edited by Matthew DeLisi More articles in Journal of Criminal Justice from Elsevier |
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