1. AGE AND ITS RELATION TO CRIME IN TAIWAN AND THE UNITED STATES: INVARIANT, OR DOES CULTURAL CONTEXT MATTER?
- Author
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STEFFENSMEIER, DARRELL, ZHONG, HUA, and LU, YUNMEI
- Subjects
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CRIME & age , *RISK-taking behavior , *ADOLESCENT psychology , *DATABASES - Abstract
Current empirical and theoretical understanding of the relation between age and crime is based almost entirely on data from the United States and a few prototypical Western societies for which age-specific crime information across offense types is available. By using Western databases, Hirschi and Gottfredson (1983) projected that the age distribution of crime is always and everywhere robustly right-skewed (i.e., sharp adolescent peak)-a thesis that is both contested and widely accepted in criminology and social science writings. In the study described here, we tested this age-crime invariance thesis by comparing age-crime patterns in Taiwan (a non-Western Chinese society) with those in the United States. In light of Taiwan's collectivist culture versus the U.S. individualist gestalt, we anticipated more divergence than homogeneity in their age-crime schedules. Our findings show robust divergence in Taiwan's age-crime patterns compared with U.S. patterns and the reverted J-shaped norm projected by Hirschi and Gottfredson. Implications for research and theory on the age-crime relation and for studying human development or life-course topics more broadly are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
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