Search

We extend the routine activity perspective's situational analysis of crime to individual offending and to a broad range of deviant behaviors. In this view, unstructured socializing with peers in the absence of authority figures presents opportunities for deviance: In the presence of peers, deviant acts will be easier and more rewarding; the absence of authority figures reduces the potential for social control responses to deviance; and the lack of structure leaves time available for deviant behavior. To determine whether individuals who spend more time in unstructured socializing activities engage in deviant behaviors more frequently, we analyzed within-individual changes in routine activities and deviance across five waves of data for a national sample of more than 1,700 18- to 26-year-olds. Participation in these routine activities was strongly associated with criminal behavior, heavy alcohol use, use of marijuana and other illicit drugs, and dangerous driving. Furthermore, routine activities accounted for a substantial portion of the association between these deviant behaviors and age, sex, and socioeconomic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because a wide variety of deviant behaviors are positively correlated with one another, some researchers conclude that all are manifestations of a single general tendency. The present analysis incorporated three waves of self-reports about heavy alcohol use, marijuana use, use of other illicit drugs, dangerous driving, and other criminal behavior for a nationally representative sample of high school seniors. A relatively stable general involvement in deviance accounted for virtually all association between different types of deviance, but the stability of each behavior could only be explained by equally important and stable specific influences. Thus, theories that treat different deviant behaviors as alternative manifestations of a single general tendency can account for some, but far from all, of the meaningful variance in these behaviors, The only significant influence of one type of deviance on another was that of marijuana use on later use of other illicit drugs. The causal model also revealed interpretable shifts in the associations among these behaviors over the four years following high school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]