Discussion

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This study investigated factors associated with youth delinquency using data from the International Youth Survey (IYS) collected by Statistics Canada in Toronto schools in 2006. Overall, the results indicate that delinquent behaviour is associated with multiple factors linked to the school environment, experiences of victimization, and family and peer relationships. Several of our findings should be highlighted.

First, the results showed that youths' views of, and commitment to, school were linked to delinquent behaviour. Specifically, skipping school, lacking university aspirations and viewing the school as unsafe were all associated with greater chances of engaging in both property and violent delinquency. Notably, school factors were related to delinquency regardless of the other characteristics of individuals. These results are consistent with previous research emphasizing the importance of the school environment in shaping youth behaviour and outcomes (Fitzgerald, 2003; Resnick et al., 1997).

Second, we found evidence of a link between victimization and delinquent behaviour. This was particularly the case for violent delinquency, where those who had been stolen from, had received threats to give up their belongings, or had experienced discrimination because of their 'religion, language or race' also had significantly higher chances of engaging in violent delinquency. These relationships held even after accounting for other youth characteristics and risk factors. Our findings coincide with the results of previous studies linking victimization to subsequent serious violent offending among youth (Loeber, Kalb and Huizinga, 2001), and suggest that exposure to particular forms of victimization may have serious implications for youths' own behaviour.

Third, the results presented here demonstrate that youths' relationships with family-members and friends are important factors in understanding delinquent behaviour. In particular, youth who tended to go out at night without their parents, and who spent the majority of their time with friends, rather than family-members, were more likely to engage in both property and violent delinquency. In addition, having a positive relationship with one's father or mother significantly reduced the chances of being involved in violent delinquency. Taken together, these results continue to emphasize the importance of effective parental monitoring and positive parent-child relationships in understanding youth behaviour that have been noted in other studies (Amato and Fowler, 2002).

Above all, this study provides evidence that exposure to delinquent peer networks has important implications for youths' own behaviour. Specifically, the attitudes of friends emerged as the most important correlate of both property and violent delinquency after taking into account all other factors in the study. Thus, youth who indicated that committing illegal acts was accepted by members of their peer group, had significantly greater probabilities of engaging in both property and violent delinquency than those who did not. This finding is consistent with other research suggesting that belonging to a peer group in which social controls against crime are weak, may facilitate the development of delinquent behaviours among youth (Bursik and Grasmick, 1993).

Limitations and future research

A number of limitations must be acknowledged in considering the results in this study. To begin with, the IYS does not track the same respondents over time, rather, the survey design is cross-sectional in nature. As a result, it is not possible to determine the timing, nor the causal ordering of events. Second, the survey was only given to youth who received parental consent and were at school on the day the survey was administered. Since the study found that skipping school was associated with increased delinquency, it is possible that delinquency was underreported since youth who were most likely to report committing delinquency may not have been present to participate. Third, an important limitation in this study is the lack of information on the socioeconomic characteristics of families, such as household income and parental education and occupation. Although this information is not available directly through the IYS, future work could make use of Census data to examine the relationship between self-reported youth delinquency and the socioeconomic conditions of the population residing in the neighbourhoods in which schools are located. And, finally, while the IYS collects the country of birth for both parents and youth, it is not possible to determine ethnicity or visible minority status. This places an important limitation on the findings, as both of these factors are important in terms of education and delinquency outcomes, especially for immigrant youth (Zhou, 1997).