Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 18, No.

4, December 2002 ( 2002 )

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors: American, Dutch, Hungarian, and Swiss Youth1
Alexander T. Vazsonyi,2,7 Lloyd E. Pickering,3 Lara M. Belliston,4 Dick Hessing,5 and Marianne Junger6

The current investigation examined cross-national similarities and dierences in routine activities, measures of deviance, and their relationship in representative samples of *7,000 adolescents aged 1519 years (mean age: 17.5 years) from Hungary, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. For the majority of youth, most of their time was spent in solitary activities, followed by peer activities, community/sports activities, and family activities; Hungarian youth reported spending a much greater amount of time with the family than adolescents from other countries, while Dutch youth spent far more time in solitary activities than their peers. Rates of total deviance were remarkably similar for American, Dutch, and Swiss youth; Hungarian youth reported substantially lower rates than all other adolescents. Finally, ndings indicated that routine activities accounted for 18% for males and 16% for females of the variance explained in total deviance. Furthermore, with the exceptions of alcohol and drug use, country had very little or no explanatory power in deviance. The current study suggests that the utility and the explanatory power of the routine activities framework replicates across national boundaries. KEY WORDS: deviant behavior; delinquency; routine activities; cross-cultural research.

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the First Annual Meetings of the European Society of Criminology in Lausanne, Switzerland (September, 2001) and the 53rd Annual Meetings of the American Society of Criminology in Atlanta, Georgia (November, 2001). 2 Department of Human Development and Family Studies, 284 Spidle Hall, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849. 3 Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Auburn University, Auburn, AL. 4 Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Auburn University, Auburn, AL. 5 Law Faculty, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. 6 Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. 7 To whom all correspondence should be addressed at: Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Auburn University, 284 Spidle Hall, Auburn, Alabama 36849. E-mail: vazsonyi@auburn.edu

397
0748-4518/02/12000397/0 2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation

398

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

1. INTRODUCTION Based on the routine activities approach to crime and deviance (Felson and Cohen, 1979), criminologists (e.g., Riley, 1987) and developmentalists (e.g., Mahoney and Stattin, 2000) have examined the relationship between how youth spend their time and deviant or antisocial behavior. As recently noted by Osgood et al. (1996), surprisingly few empirical investigations have examined implications and basic premises of the routine activities framework for the relationship between routine activities and deviance (Agnew and Petersen, 1989; Hawdon, 1996, 1999; Osgood et al., 1996; Riley, 1987), although a larger number of studies have examined this framework for criminal victimization (e.g., Miethe et al., 1987). Furthermore, with very few exceptions (Swedish youth, Mahoney and Stattin, 2000 or English/Welsh youth, Riley, 1987), most work that has been completed in this area has relied on data from the United States. Unfortunately, this is very consistent with criminological research in general (for a discussion, see Barberet, 2001; Farrington, 1999a, 1999b). As pointed out by Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990), explanations of crime and deviance should be culture-free in the sense that the same explanatory frameworks, if powerful and generalizable enough, should also stand up to cross-cultural (within a country) and cross-national (between countries) comparative eorts (for this argument, see also Farrington, 1999a, 1999b; for an empirical study, see e.g., Vazsonyi et al., 2001). In fact, cross-national comparative work has the great advantage of providing a naturally large degree of diversity and variability with regard to individual, social, or institutional indicators (Howard et al., 2000). In a recent review on the current state of comparative criminology, Howard and colleagues (2000, p. 183) note that self-report surveys at the cross-national level may eventually prove to be a valuable resource on oenders and patterns of delinquency, acknowledging the value of such data for exploring potentially culture-free or universal patterns of behavior. Farrington (1999a) notes that though cross-national studies are important, they are very infrequent; nevertheless, they are perhaps one of the only tools to establish true generalizability of explanatory frameworks and theories across local conditions and contexts (for an empirical example, see Farrington and Loeber, 1999). Therefore, the primary focus of the current investigation was to further examine the routine activities explanatory framework using self-report data from four countries; more specically, we were interested in testing whether the relationships between dierent types of routine activities (family, peer, solitary, and community) and various deviance measures were similar or dierent by country.

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors

399

1.1. Background In seminal publications introducing the routine activities/lifestyles concepts, Felson and Cohen (1979) and Hindelang et al. (1978) provided novel ways of thinking about and explaining aggregate crime perpetration and victimization, respectively, by linking micro- and macro-level variables. Felson and Cohen (1979, p. 593) dened routine activities as any recurrent and prevalent activities which provide for basic population and individual needs, whatever their biological or cultural origin. They also suggest that these activities may occur (1) at home, (2) in jobs away from home, and (3) in other activities away from home. In eect, the authors have argued, in simple terms, that how and where we spend our time may impact whether we are victimized and whether we engage in norm-violating conduct or not8 (see also, Garfalo, 1987), independent of social or cultural context. Although perhaps not specically elaborated by these authors, we believe that implicit in this thinking and perspective are ideas similar to control theories. In fact, Felson and Cohen (1979, p. 590) note each successfully completed violation minimally requires an oender with both criminal inclination and the ability to carry out those inclinations, a person or object providing a suitable target for the oender, and the absence of guardians capable of preventing violations. They further note that though guardianship is implicit in everyday life, it is usually marked by the absence of violations; hence it is easy to overlook (1979, p. 590). In this sense we suggest that the routine activities perspective contains elements of social control as elaborated by Hirschi (1969) when he spoke of involvement (for a recent empirical test of this idea, see Hawdon, 1999) or attachment to parents and which Felson and Cohen termed guardianship. Furthermore, it may also include the idea of low selfcontrol when, for example, the authors refer to an oender with a criminal inclination (e.g., Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990). In fact, in his later writing on the routine activity approach, Felson (1994, p. 20) specically acknowledged self-control, terming it the self-control insight, by suggesting that individuals dier in their basic propensity to get into trouble, especially by going for the pleasure of the moment. Whether individuals violate norms largely depends on the informal controls the individual encounters in society and in daily life; these controls eectively prevent crime.
8

In describing their original thinking about the routine activity approach, Felson and Cohen (1980, p. 403) suggested that the routine activity approach might in the future be applied to the analysis of oenders and their inclinations as well. For example, the structure of primary group activity may aect the likelihood that cultural transmission or social control of criminal inclinations will occur, while the structure of the community may inuence the extent of peer group activity inuencing crime.

400

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

Thus, the underlying premise of the routine activities idea can be traced to and may be related to control theories, something Gottfredson (1981) has alluded to previously. Hirschi (1969) suggested that we need not be concerned with what makes people deviant or criminal; rather, we need to develop an understanding of what makes individuals conform or how they conform. In turn, this will allow a greater understanding of what contributes to individual tendencies to violate social norms and mores. In this sense, the routine activities or lifestyles frameworks may be useful in gaining an understanding of how, where, and perhaps with whom individuals spend their time. Put dierently, individuals with weak attachments and/or a greater individual propensity to commit a norm-violating act may spend their time in systematically dierent ways than individuals who are less likely to commit a deviant act. It is precisely this variability we are interested in as we believe that variability in routine activities/lifestyles is associated with variability in deviant behaviors. In the strictest sense then, we also suggest that the routine activities perspective is not necessarily a strong causal explanation, because it simply focuses on explaining crime and victimization by examining the actors, how they spend their time, and the ecological controls they encounter in their environment. Rather, we consider it an important theoretical perspective which has inspired a good amount of recent empirical investigations (e.g., Agnew and Petersen, 1989; Fox and Sobol, 2000; Hawdon, 1996, 1999; Mahoney and Stattin, 2000; Riley, 1987; Wittebrood and Nieuwbeerta, 2000). In the following section, we briey review some of the important empirical work that has focused on the relationship between routine activities and deviant behaviors.

1.2. Previous Investigations The studies with most relevance to the current investigation have conceptualized routine activities in one of two main ways. First, activities were examined as being either structured vs. unstructured and/or supervised vs. unsupervised by an adult (Mahoney and Stattin, 2000; Osgood et al., 1996). Second, activities have been examined according to specic content (e.g., housework, games/crafts/hobbies, or music/art; e.g., Agnew and Petersen, 1989). It is important to note here that no previous study has attempted to model the relationship between routine activities or leisure and deviance using a composite measure approach; in other words, all work to date has used single item indicators of routine activities. Perhaps one of the most rigorous studies in this area of research has been the one by Osgood and colleagues (1996). In their large-scale longitudinal investigation, the authors developed a model of routine activities and general deviance (perpetration) for late adolescents and young adults

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors

401

ages 18 to 26. More specically, they examined the relationship between a variety of routine activities (categorized as either unstructured activities outside the home, other more structured activities outside the home, or athome activities; explicitly excluding sustenance activities, school, or work) and several types of deviant conduct. They found that the lack of structure leaves time available for deviance; the presence of peers makes it easier to participate in deviant acts and makes them more rewarding; and the absence of authority gures reduces the potential for social control responses to deviance (1996, p. 651). More specically, regression models including 13 dierent structured and unstructured activities as well as age accounted for between 3% (other drug use) and 15% (criminal behavior; average across all ve types of deviance: 8.7%). They were also able to demonstrate how routine activities conditioned the relationship between background variables (e.g., age, sex, grades, and parental education) and measures of deviance. For example, routine activities accounted for 73% of the observed relationship between parental education and deviance. Despite its great importance, this investigation also has some limitations that we would like to mention. For example, although the authors make an explicit attempt to suggest that the measures of routine activities carried no connotations of the outcome of interest in their study, namely deviance, we believe that they did. In fact, joy riding and attending parties both inherently include potentially norm-violating conduct. Consider party attendance: for many, perhaps even most adolescent and young adults in the United States, attending a party includes consuming alcohol and/or other illegal substances. Not surprisingly, this routine activity was associated with all measures of deviance; furthermore, it had the strongest association with the deviance measures across all 13 items with the exception of dangerous driving. Interestingly, an earlier study assessing the relationship between routine activities and victimization by Jensen and Browneld (1986) resulted in the same nding, namely that activities which involve the mutual pursuit of fun are more victimogenic (p. 85). The authors had also found this strong relationship between these activities and delinquent behavior. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this routine activity accounted for a very large proportion of the 1% to 10% of variance explained by unstructured activities in dierent measures of deviance. One important implication of this is that deviance-free measures of routine activities may in fact account for less variance than suggested by the authors. As pointed out earlier, a second issue in this study is the measurement of routine activities by single items. We believe that forming composites or clusters of related activities to measure some behavioral aspect of how adolescents spend their time might provide more stable or consistent measurement.

402

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

In a recent cross-sectional study of *700 Swedish adolescents by Mahoney and Stattin (2000), the authors found that participating in unstructured leisure activities was most associated with antisocial behaviors, for both males and females. Not surprisingly, they also found that these same youth experienced the least amount of parental monitoring in comparison to other youth. Furthermore, they found that these youth spent more time with older peers, peers who did poorly in school, peers who stayed out on the town at night, and peers who had previously been picked up by the police. An important limitation of this work was that routine activity was measured by two dichotomously coded variables based on (1) structured activity measures (e.g., sports, music, hobby, church, etc.) and (2) youth recreation center membership which was considered unstructured. The authors employed ANOVAs and, therefore, did not report the amount of variance explained in deviance by routine activities which makes comparisons with Osgood et al.s study challenging. Agnew and Petersen (1989) examined a similar set of questions based on a local American sample of 600 adolescents. Using open-ended interview data, each respondent indicated ve favorite ways of spending your free time (1989, p. 338), who they spent this time with, and how frequently they did so. Of the 265 activities recorded, the authors developed a typology of leisure activities (e.g., sports-competitive, sports-noncompetitive, passive entertainment, hanging out/loang, etc.). Results suggested that the activity and the company youth kept accounted for 5% to 6% of minor, serious, and total delinquency. The authors also found that this relationship was largely unchanged once they controlled for sex, age, maternal and paternal education, and the size of the home community. These ndings were both similar and dierent in comparison to Osgood et al.s studysimilar in the amount of variance explained in delinquency or deviance, but dierent in that background variables had little or no explanatory power. Finally, in another important eort based on *700 youth in England and Wales, Riley (1987) completed interviews to ascertain the frequency of time spent with peers, types of peer activities, and the location where adolescents congregated. He also measured self-reported delinquent behaviors. Riley tested the notion that juvenile oending is primarily a group activity. In eect, some types of delinquency, such as vandalism, are likely to occur away from parental supervision. He found that individuals who reported a large amount of delinquent behaviors spent signicantly less time at home and more time with large groups of peers than adolescents who reported few such behaviors. This association was true of both males and females; however, he found that females had lower rates of deviance due to less time spent in situations conducive to crime. Oenders often congregated in groups away from home, spent less time in home-based

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors

403

activities, and less time with parents. Riley concluded that time spent away from home provided the context in which adolescent deviant activity occurs. It is important to point out that Riley (1987, p. 347) also questioned the causal value of the routine activity framework, namely whether lifestyle or activity pattern analysis [is] simply another way of presenting what we already know about the relationship between delinquency predictors and involvement in crime. Finally, two important limitations of this study include that Riley focused on Saturday leisure time which only constitutes a very small proportion of free time by adolescents that requires analysis. Second, most of Rileys ndings were based on dichotomized (yes/no) frequency comparisons on oending (behavior), oending with peers (with whom), or oending away from home (location). Although an important rst step in attempting to understand the relationship between routine activities and deviance, we believe that an examination of routine activities must also include the time after school during week days; it must also include more complex analyses to fully examine the relation between routine activities and deviance. Together, the studies reviewed suggest that time at home and time spent pursuing personal interests or time in structured activities decreases the likelihood of deviant behaviors while spending time with peers, especially in unstructured and unsupervised activities, places youth at risk for deviant behavior. Though the reviewed studies contribute to our understanding of leisure and deviance in various countries (e.g., England/Wales, Sweden, and the United States), no studies have directly examined the relationship between routine activities and deviance cross-nationally. The importance of such a comparison lies in the fact that dierent cultures and countries are like natural experimentsyouth do not live the same way in these national contexts and, therefore, the comparative method provides an excellent medium to further test the routine activitiesdeviance relationship and whether it generalizes cross-nationally.

1.3. The Current Investigation The current investigation sought to extend this line of research in a number of important ways: (1) to reassess the relationship between adolescent routine activities and deviance using (a) large samples from four countries (Hungary, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States) and (b) middle and late adolescents ages 15 to 20 years. Based on our review, it was important to us to include measures of routine activities that did not include or imply norm-violating conduct.

404

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

(2) to assess the relationship between routine activities and deviance using a number of multi-item, scalar measures of deviance (ranging from vandalism, alcohol use, drug use, school misconduct, general deviance, theft, assault, and total deviance). (3) to examine the importance of national context as a moderator of the routine activitiesdeviance relationship; in other words, does country play an important role in explaining this relationship?

2. METHODS 2.1. Procedure The data for this study were collected as part of the International Study of Adolescent Development (ISAD), a multinational, multisite investigation consisting of *8,500 subjects from four dierent countries (Hungary, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States; see Appendix A). The purpose of ISAD is to examine the etiology of adolescent problem behaviors and deviance using large representative samples from dierent countries (Vazsonyi et al., 2001; Vazsonyi and Pickering, 2000). A standard data collection protocol was followed across all study locations. It was approved by a university IRB and consisted of a self-report data collection instrument which included instructions on how to complete the survey, a description of the ISAD project, and assurances of anonymity and condentiality. Questionnaires were administered to participants during a 1 to 2 hr period. Much attention was given to the development of the ISAD survey instrument, particularly by developing new or using existing measures that could be used cross-culturally without losing nuances or changing meanings. This included an evaluation of survey items as to whether they assessed a readily observable and ratable behavior in each of the countries included in the current study. The focus of the current study was to employ measurement in four distinctly dierent countries where previous local eorts can generally not be compared across national and cultural boundaries (for a discussion, see Archer and Gartner, 1984). For example, studies have asked about deviant behaviors that are deviant in a specic national context, but that are basically nonexistent in others. Consider the followingAmericans cannot relate to theft of mopeds because there exist relatively few or no mopeds in the United States. On the other hand, Swiss and Dutch youth know mopeds quite well as very many 14 year olds own one. Similarly, while adolescents in all three European countries cannot understand trying to cash a phony check because checks are not used as payment currency in daily nancial dealings, every American knows what check writing is quite well. Aside from FBI and Interpol categories of index crimes reported in ocial data

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors

405

sources, there exists very little work that has attempted to develop comprehensive, multi-item, multi-factor scales that can reliably assess behaviors cross-nationally (for a discussion on deviance measures, see Mott, 1988; Junger-Tas, 1988). Therefore, the current survey was translated from English into each of the target languages (Dutch, German, and Hungarian) and back-translated by bilingual translators. Surveys were carefully examined by additional bilingual translators, and when translation was dicult or ambiguous, consensus was used to produce the nal translation. We need to acknowledge that using the self-report methodology has been debated for numerous decades, and we realize that questionnaires, whether used in a single country or multiple countries, have inherent short-comings and weaknesses. However, we would also like to suggest that the validity and reliability of self report assessment tools have been well established previously (e.g., Farrington, 1988; Hindelang, Hirschi, and Weis, 1981; JungerTas and Marshall, 1999; Mott, 1988).

2.2. Sample Valid data for this study were gathered from a total of N 8;417 adolescents from four dierent countries (Hungary, n 871; Netherlands, n 1;315; Switzerland, n 4;018; United States, n 2;213). In all locations, medium-sized cities of similar size were selected for participation. For each country, dierent schools were selected for participation to obtain representative samples of the general population. For the European samples, this included schools for university-bound students (Gymnasium) as well as schools specializing in vocational/technical training for students in apprenticeships. In the United States, the samples included high school students, community college students, and university students (for a detailed description of the sample, see Vazsonyi et al., 2001). We selected a common age band including 15 to 19 year olds for the current study across all country samples; this reduced the sample to n 6;914 (82% of the total sample). The nal study sample included n 1;516 Americans, n 1;040 Dutch, n 797 Hungarians, and n 3;561 Swiss. There were n 3;913 males (mean age 17:5, sd 1:3) and n 2;939 females (mean age 17:5, sd 1:4) in this sample; 62 participants did not identify their sex. Of the Hungarian adolescents in the sample, n 544 were males and n 242 were female (11 Hungarian subjects did not identify their sex). The Dutch adolescents were composed of n 495 males and n 540 females (5 Dutch subjects did not identify their sex). Among the Swiss adolescents, n 2;235 were males and n 1;291 were females (35 Swiss subjects did not identify their sex). Finally, the American adolescents

406

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

in the sample consisted of n 639 who were males, and n 866 who were females (11 American subjects did not identify their sex).

2.3. Measures Subjects from all countries were asked to ll out the same questionnaire including demographic and background variables (age, sex, and social class), routine activities, and deviance. 2.3.1. Age Participants were asked to indicate the month and year in which they were born. The 15th day of each respective month was used to calculate subjects specic ages. 2.3.2. Sex Subjects were asked to indicate their sex on a single item: What is your gender? Responses were given as 1 male and 2 female. 2.3.3. Social Class Subjects were asked to indicate the type of work performed by the primary wage earner in the family. Six categories collapsed from Hollingsheads (1975) original nine categories and modied to be applicable in each of the four countries were specied that would readily map on professions found in each of the four study countries. Each category contained descriptions of sample jobs which would t into each of them. Responses were given by indicating the number of the category which contained the closest or most accurate description of the familys primary wage earners job. The categories, listed here with condensed descriptions, were as follows: 1 owner of a large business, executive; 2 owner of a small business, professional; 3 semi-professional, skilled laborer; 4 clerical sta; 5 semiskilled laborer; and 6 laborer or service worker. 2.3.4. Country Participants were each identied in the data according to their national membership (American, Swiss, Hungarian, or Dutch). In some of our regression analyses, this variable (national membership) was used as a dummy-coded predictor.

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors

407

2.3.5. Routine Activities We were interested in examining variability in dierent leisure contexts and not in establishing exact estimates of time adolescents spend in specic activities or behaviors; therefore, we employed a subjective, molar time recall self-report methodology of routine activities that excluded time spent at school, at work, or sleeping (see also, Osgood et al., 1996). We focused on the waking hours after school and before bedtime to examine how adolescents spend their time. We also examined routine activities on weekends. Rather than using individual indicators, we employed 2 or more items to assess each area of routine activities. Subjects answered a total of 11 questions concerning the time they spent engaging in specic activities. For 8 of these items, subjects were asked to indicate the time spent in an average week after school and on weekends (1) playing school or community sports or participating in school clubs, (2) watching TV alone, (3) doing homework or reading alone, (4) hanging out with friends in a public place, (5) hanging out with friends at someones house, (6) exercising, jogging, working out, other forms of exercise or leisure sports, (7) spending time alone, and (8) participating in community organizations. Each of these items was rated on a 5-point Likert type scale 1 none, 2 15 hr, 3 610 hr, 4 1119 hr, 5 20 hr). A principal components exploratory factor analysis on these 8 items using varimax rotation yielded a solution of 3 factors with Eigenvalues greater than 1. The rst factor, named Peer Activities, consisted of items 4 and 5 above, while the second factor, named Community/Sports Activities, included items 1, 6, and 8, and the third factor, named Solitary Activities, contained items 2, 3, and 7. Three scores were formed by summing individual items.9 A quantitative measure of family time, named Family Activities, was constructed by combining 3 items (Pickering and Vazsonyi, 2002).10 The rst two items, which were answered on a 5-point Likert type scale 1 0, 2 1, 3 2, 4 3, 5 45) read, (a) On the average, how many afterThe subjective time recall methodology of routine activities required some transformations prior to analyses. For 8 items these we recoded responses into hour estimates, namely 0, 5, 10, 20, and 25. 10 For family time, we recoded two items (weekday) to include a oor of zero. Next, we dierentially weighted the three items based on previous work by Csikszentmihalyi and Larson (1984; for additional detail, see Pickering and Vazsonyi, 2002). This included an assumption that on average, an adolescent could spend a conservative maximum of 2 hr on a weekday afternoon and 3 hr on a weekday evening with family. Similarly, we very conservatively hypothesized based on previous work that an adolescent could spend up to 6 hr per weekend day with family, for a maximum of 12 hr per weekend. We also assumed that time spent during the week and time spent on weekends are associated. Therefore, we multiplied time spent during the week by 1.11.5 based on the response to the weekend time item to assess a total measure of family time.
9

408

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

noons during the school week, from the end of school or work to dinner, have you spent talking, working, or playing with members of your family? and (b) On the average, how many evenings during the school week, from dinnertime to bedtime, have you spent talking, working, or playing with members of your family? (see Warr, 1993, who used a 6-point Likert type scale for these two items). The third item asked, On the weekends, how much time have you generally spent talking, working, or playing with members of your family? and was measured on a 5-point Likert type scale (1 very little, 2 not too much, 3 some, 4 quite a bit, 5 a great deal). For subsequent mean level comparisons, each of the four routine activity scores was centered by summing the reports from all four contexts and then dividing each activity by the summed total. 2.3.6. Deviance Lifetime deviance was measured by the 55-item Normative Deviance Scale (NDS; for more detail on the measure, see Vazsonyi et al., 2001). The scale was developed to measure culture-free deviance in general adolescent populations and to provide epidemiological data, and, therefore, examined a broader spectrum of deviant activities than just status and index oenses. Rather, it also measured less serious forms of norm-violating conduct that transcend culture. The current investigation examined all seven subscales of the NDS, namely vandalism (8 items), alcohol (7 items), drugs (9 items), school misconduct (7 items), general deviance (11 items), theft (7 items), and assault (6 items). Responses for all items in the NDS were given on a 5-point Likert type scale and identied lifetime frequency of specic behaviors (1 never, 2 one time, 3 2 3 times, 4 4 6 times, and 5 more than 6 times). Reliability coecients on the deviance subscales for the total sample ranged from  0:76 (assault) to  0:89 (drugs; total deviance,  0:95; scales were also reliable in each subsample (see Vazsonyi et al., 2001). 3. RESULTS Table I presents the mean ages and the frequencies of the primary wage earners job by country. Mean level age dierences by country were statistically signicant (F 811:62, p 0:001. Similarly, comparisons by social class also indicated signicant dierences by country (X2 700:85, p < 0:001. Therefore, we controlled for both age and social class in subsequent regression analyses. Table II presents mean rates of routine activities and deviance by country and sex. Because routine activities variables were standardized

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors Table I. Descriptive Statistics of Demographic Variables by Country

409

Total sample n 6;914 American Dutch Hungarian Swiss n 1;516 n 1;040 n 797 n 3;561 Age (mean) Primary wage earners profession Executive Professional Semi-professional Clerical Semi-skilled Laborer 17.9 33.8 40.3 13.4 6.9 4.6 0.1 16.4 19.1 37.8 27.9 11.5 2.7 0.1 16.7 16.0 22.5 17.6 33.3 9.0 1.5 17.9 16.0 35.0 31.7 12.5 3.2 1.7

within each country to allow for comparisons, mean values can be interpreted as actual percentages of time spent in each context of activity. An examination of these means indicated that both males and females in all four countries reported spending the greatest amount of their time alone (male average: 34.7%; female average: 35.6%). Next, for males, all but the Hungarians indicated spending the second greatest amount of time with peers (average: 24.0%), then in community/sports activities (average: 22.1%), then nally, with family (average: 19.1%). Both American and Swiss females reported spending more time with family than in community/sports activities; in fact, for all four groups of females, community/sports activities (average: 19.0%) ranked last. Both Hungarian males and females, as well as Dutch females, reported the same rank ordering of routine activities, namely solitary, peer, community/sports, and family. In comparisons on deviance measures, ndings suggested that males were consistently more deviant than females; this was true in each country. Adolescents indicated that alcohol use was the most common form of deviance for both males and females across all countries. Similarly, adolescents reported the lowest levels of participation for theft across all groups. Table II also includes the results of ANOVAs with post-hoc Schee contrasts for routine activities and deviant behavior by country and sex. For male and female family time, Hungarians reported spending a signicantly larger proportion of their time with family than youth from all other countries, while American adolescents were signicantly higher in family time than both Swiss and Dutch youth. American and Swiss males and females were very close in the amount of time spent with peers and were all signicantly higher than Hungarians. In addition, American and Swiss females reported a greater amount of time spent with peers than Dutch females. Dutch males and females reported spending signicantly more time alone than their counterparts in all three other groups; the Swiss were also

410

Table II. Oneway ANOVAs on Routine Activities and Deviance by Country and Sex (Controlling for Age and Social Class)
Americans Males Females ma sd m sd Routine activities Family Peers Solitary Community Deviance Scale Vandalism Alcohol use Drug use School misconduct General Theft Assault Total deviance Dutch Males Females m sd m sd Hungarians Males Females m sd m sd Swiss Males Females m sd m sd Sig. Schee post-hoc testsb (Males) Sig. Schee post-hoc tests (Females)

20.3 25.7 29.9 24.2

12.8 13.6 12.5 12.7

24.4 24.9 28.4 22.1

11.8 12.9 11.7 12.2

15.8 23.0 42.5 18.5

13.4 13.1 15.4 12.7

18.8 17.7 46.2 17.4

14.6 11.9 16.3 11.4

24.2 22.0 32.5 21.3

14.8 13.1 15.3 13.3

29.7 19.9 32.5 17.8

13.1 11.0 13.0 10.6

16.2 25.4 34.0 24.3

11.5 13.7 12.8 14.0

21.0 25.3 35.1 18.6

12.5 12.3 12.1 12.2

acdf acdef adef

abcdef aef acdef ac

1.84 2.72 2.10 2.28 2.10 1.61 1.75 2.05

0.85 1.35 1.16 1.02 0.83 0.79 0.77 0.79

1.30 2.67 1.83 1.68 1.68 1.23 1.27 1.69

0.49 1.22 0.98 0.60 0.60 0.46 0.49 0.56

1.83 2.50 1.84 2.38 2.26 1.55 1.75 2.02

0.83 0.85 1.04 0.84 0.78 0.67 0.73 0.67

1.28 2.20 1.49 1.80 1.81 1.25 1.40 1.65

0.43 0.78 0.70 0.56 0.56 0.46 0.51 0.46

1.77 2.42 1.61 2.15 1.91 1.41 1.71 1.84

0.80 0.98 0.75 0.79 0.76 0.62 0.70 0.62

1.31 1.86 1.22 1.46 1.47 1.16 1.31 1.44

0.46 0.75 0.43 0.48 0.48 0.35 0.46 0.40

1.85 2.32 2.27 2.17 2.20 1.69 1.80 2.06

0.80 0.95 1.13 0.79 0.82 0.83 0.77 0.72

1.32 1.87 1.81 1.78 1.78 1.32 1.33 1.66

0.42 0.80 0.95 0.57 0.57 0.47 0.46 0.49

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

cef bdef de bdf bef

abcde bf acd adf

bdf

Note: Analyses used pairwise deletion, therefore, sample sizes slightly varied by analysis: American males, n 542563; American females, n 772 790; Dutch males, n 417423; Dutch females, n 471477; Hungarian males, n 526531; Hungarian females, n 220233; Swiss males, n 2;0852,166; Swiss females, n 1;2501,264. a For routine activities, group means can be interpreted as a percent since they were computed by scaling each type of routine activity by the total time reported. b Since residualized means are dicult to interpret, numbers listed here indicate group means before entering control variables, while signicant Schee post-hoc comparisons (p < 0:05 indicate relationships after controlling for age and social class and are noted by the following designations: a, American vs. Dutch; b, American vs. Hungarian; c, American vs. Swiss; d, Dutch vs. Hungarian; e, Dutch vs. Swiss; f, Hungarian vs. Swiss.

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors

411

signicantly higher in this category than Americans for both sexes. Also, Hungarian females reported spending more time alone than their American peers. Among females, Americans reported the highest levels of community/ sports activities with signicantly higher mean values than all three other nationalities. For males, however, the Swiss reported the highest levels of community/sports activities and were found to be signicantly higher than both Dutch and Hungarians. Finally, American males reported signicantly greater proportions of time spent in community/sports activities than the Dutch. Results of ANOVAs on the deviance scales revealed that American adolescents of both sexes were signicantly higher in alcohol use than all three European groups. In addition, Dutch females reported signicantly more use of alcohol than Swiss or Hungarians. A similar pattern of drug use was found for both males and females; namely, both Americans and Swiss reported signicantly higher levels than both Dutch and Hungarians. Dutch males reported the highest levels of school misconduct and were found to be signicantly higher than Hungarian and Swiss males. For females, the Dutch reported the highest levels of school misconduct and, along with the Swiss, were signicantly higher than Hungarians. American females reported signicantly lower levels of school misconduct than both Swiss and Dutch females. Patterns of general deviance were found to be the same for both sexes where Hungarians reported signicantly lower levels than all three other groups. Swiss males indicated the highest levels of theft and were signicantly higher than both Dutch and Hungarian males, while American males were also signicantly higher than Hungarians. Mean level comparisons on the total deviance scale indicated that the Hungarians, both males and females, were signicantly lower than adolescents in all three other countries, who were remarkably similar to each other within sex. No signicant mean level dierences were found in the areas of male and female vandalism and assault or in female theft by country. Next, in an eort to compare the relationship between routine activities and measures of deviance, we compared patterns of associations between independent variables and outcomes, something Rowe and colleagues (1994) termed developmental process. Rowe et al. (1994) suggested comparing entire matrices from each group that include the antecedents, in this case routine activities variables, and outcomes, in this case measures of deviance. This approach appears to be superior to a large number of pairwise comparisons for each association. For example, to compare whether a single relationship between alcohol use and family time diers by country and sex (8 groups), 28 pairwise comparisons would have to be computed. This means that for eight (males and females from four countries) 11 11 matrices (7 deviance scales and 4 routine activities measures), each containing 55 correlations, 440

412

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

pairwise comparisons would have to be computed. Not only is such a piecemeal approach of pairwise dierence testing extremely tedious (not to mention impossible to comprehend), but it is also likely to increase the risk of Type I error (inferring relationships where there are really none). In short, such an approach would be statistically unsound. For this purpose, controlling for age and social class, we computed eight 11 11 correlation matrices by sex and by country which were then used for a model-free comparison using LISREL (Rowe et al., 1994).11 Table III shows partial correlations between routine activities and deviance; however, for the model-free LISREL comparisons, we employed the full matrix. Consistent with previous work and with our expectations, routine activities with peers were positively associated with deviance, while routine activities in the family, alone, and in the community were negatively associated with deviance, although due to both small associations as well as sample size, a number of the solitary and community routine activities were not statistically signicant. Based on suggestions by Loehlin (1992), we used standardized measures of association (correlations) for model-free LISREL analyses because of known mean level dierences as well as dierences in variability in both routine activities scores and deviance measures. We also employed random samples of equal size from each country as previous research using this method has documented that dierences in sample size also aected model t (Rowe et al., 1994). Therefore, for male comparisons, we randomly selected n 274 participants from each country, while for females, we selected n 186 adolescents; these sample sizes were based on the smallest study samples for each sex by country. Model t for these analyses was evaluated using the standard chi square t statistic and the chi square to degrees of freedom ratio as well as t indices such as the CFI, GFI, and the RMSEA (Browne and Cudeck, 1993; Loehlin, 1992), because the chi square statistic is overly sensitive to sample size and almost always signicant in large samples. For the CFI and GFI, a t between 0.90 and 1.0 is considered acceptable (Bentler, 1992). Browne and Cudeck (1993) suggest that an RMSEA value of less than 0.05 demonstrates excellent t, while a value between 0.05 and 0.08 suggests reasonable t. In general, they also suggest that a value between 0.08 and 0.1 demonstrates adequate t while a model with a value greater than 0.1 exhibits poor t. A well accepted rule of thumb for an acceptable chi square to df ratio varies between 2 and 3 in the literature (Hayduk, 1987; Loehlin,
11

In model-free LISREL comparisons, the program computes a tted matrix based on the four input matrices from males and based on the four matrices from females. The more individual matrices (e.g., Swiss males) deviate from the tted matrix, the worse statistical t, both overall as well as for the individual group (see Rowe et al., 1994 for an illustration).

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors

Table III. Partial Second-Order Correlations (Controlling for Age and Social Class) of Routine Activities with Deviance Scales by Country
School misconduct A D H S

Vandalism A D H S

Alcohol A D H S

Drug use A D H S

Routine activity MALES Family 0.10 Peers 0.32 Solitary 0.01 Community 0.06 FEMALES Family Peers Solitary Community

0.15 0.33 0.11 0.08

0.22 0.31 0.07 0.03

0.16 0.24 0.02 0.02

0.12 0.38 0.12 0.07

0.11 0.31 0.07 0.13

0.18 0.34 0.10 0.02

0.16 0.32 0.02 0.08

0.16 0.42 0.07 0.14

0.12 0.39 0.10 0.19

0.22 0.38 0.07 0.00

0.14 0.41 0.03 0.15

0.14 0.36 0.05 0.11

0.12 0.27 0.07 0.11

0.12 0.28 0.04 0.03

0.16 0.26 0.01 0.03

0.10 0.27 0.02 0.08

0.11 0.33 0.15 0.01

0.17 0.23 0.08 0.05

0.15 0.26 0.00 0.05

0.06 0.35 0.08 0.14

0.25 0.32 0.05 0.06

0.21 0.38 0.12 0.00

0.22 0.37 0.00 0.08

0.07 0.38 0.06 0.14

0.18 0.32 0.03 0.05

0.08 0.23 0.11 0.01

0.24 0.40 0.02 0.15

0.08 0.29 0.00 0.13

0.13 0.31 0.11 0.01

0.19 0.43 0.08 0.16

0.20 0.26 0.03 0.07

General A D H S MALES Family Peers Solitary Community FEMALES Family Peers Solidary Community

Theft A D H S

Assault A D H S

0.15 0.37 0.06 0.07

0.13 0.30 0.12 0.05

0.19 0.30 0.04 0.01

0.20 0.31 0.02 0.04

0.13 0.33 0.02 0.08

0.12 0.31 0.14 0.06

0.18 0.21 0.07 0.03

0.15 0.26 0.01 0.05

0.12 0.24 0.00 0.06

0.08 0.28 0.15 0.03

0.19 0.17 0.03 0.04

0.13 0.13 0.02 0.02

0.14 0.30 0.01 0.06

0.22 0.34 0.09 0.07

0.21 0.32 0.08 0.01

0.24 0.34 0.03 0.04

0.09 0.20 0.07 0.08

0.12 0.26 0.10 0.01

0.17 0.12 0.02 0.01

0.20 0.29 0.02 0.10

0.10 0.13 0.08 0.06

0.05 0.25 0.11 0.05

0.13 0.09 0.03 0.05

0.12 0.04 0.07 0.00 413

414

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

1992). Findings indicated that developmental processes were very similar across the four countries for both males and females (male model t: w2[198] 268.54, CFI 0.98, RMSEA 0.04; female model t: w2[198] 367.06, CFI 0.94, RMSEA 0.07). Chi square to df ratios were also well within the acceptable range, namely 1.4 for the male comparison and 1.9 for the female comparison. Each group showed minimal deviation from the aggregate LISREL model (males: all groups GFI 0.96; females: GFIs ranged from 0.90 to 0.94).12 Based on ndings of similarity, all groups from each country were combined for a nal set of analyses seeking to establish the unique predictive contributions of both routine activities and country for deviant behavior. In an initial step, we examined the importance of each routine activity context or domain on total deviance. For this purpose, we conducted an omnibus regression analysis using all cases and entering country, age, sex, and social class as controls. The following relationships were found: family, b 0.19, p 0.000; peers, b 0.35, p 0.000; solitary, b 0.02, p 0.134; and community, b 0.03, p 0.026. Next, Table IV presents the results of set hierarchical regression analyses by sex where we included routine activities and country (dummy-coded variables) as predictors of adolescent deviant behavior, while controlling for age and social class. We were interested in establishing whether country accounted for unique variance above and beyond how youth spent their time; therefore, we used a set hierarchical approach where, in the rst series of analyses, a dummy-coded variable for country was entered rst and routine activities second. Next, we simply reversed the order and entered routine activities rst followed by country. We found that routine activities uniquely explained 18% of the variance in the total deviance score for males and 16% for females. The amount of variance uniquely explained by male routine activities in the deviance subscales ranged from 6% for assault to 17% for drug use; for females, it ranged from 3% for assault to 14% for drug use. Country uniquely accounted for 0% of the variance in total deviance for males, while accounting for 1% for females. The amount of variance uniquely explained by country in the deviance subscales ranged from 0% (vandalism, theft, assault) to 3% (alcohol) for males and from 0% (vandalism, assault) to 11% (alcohol) for females. Also, the interaction term of country and routine activities accounted for 7% for males and 5% for females. Overall, routine activities and country together explained from 7% (assault) to 19% (drug
12

Due to concerns of the eect of non-normality, the same analyses were also completed where the deviance measures were log transformed. Findings were almost identical, and for females suggested even greater similarity: Male model t: w2[198] 309.23, CFI 0.98, RMSEA 0.04 (.043), GFIs range: 0.94 to 0.96; female model t: w2[198] 238.81, CFI 0.98, RMSEA 0.03 (0.028), GFIs range: 0.93 to 0.97.

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors

415

use) of the variance in the deviance subscales for males and 3% (assault) to 21% (alcohol) for females; they also accounted for 19% of the variance in total deviance for males and 17% for females.13 Figure 1 summarizes this information graphically.

4. DISCUSSION The current investigation examined the relationship between adolescent routine activities and deviance in samples from Eastern and Western Europe as well as the United States. The following important ndings were made. First, adolescents from the four countries spent their time in remarkably similar ways; most of their time was spent in solitary activities, followed by peer, family, and community/sports activities. Also, some interesting differences were found by sex. Consistent with previous work, males spent a smaller proportion of their time in the family context than females, while females spent less time in community/sports activities (Flammer et al., 1999). Second, in comparisons of deviance rates, American, Dutch, and Swiss youth were more deviant than Hungarian adolescents. With the exception of alcohol use, adolescents from Western European countries and the United States were very similar on most measures of deviance, including the total deviance score. This was somewhat unexpected given the large observed dierences cross-nationally in ocial rates of crime and delinquency (see e.g., Gartner, 1990). Furthermore, few dierences were found between the two Western European countries. In part, these great similarities were also due to the fact that less serious forms of norm violations were assessed, and that most cross-national comparisons of ocial data focus on more serious cases of index crimes. Finally, males were consistently more deviant than females in each country. Analyses on developmental processes suggested great similarity for males and for females from the four dierent countries. In other words, the relationship between how adolescents spend their time in specic routine activities and whether or not they engage in deviant behaviors was largely invariant by national context. This was further supported in subsequent regression analyses which, with the exception of alcohol use, suggested that national context had very little or no explanatory power in adolescent deviant behavior. Our ndings on the relationship between routine activities, country, and alcohol use clearly indicate a somewhat dierent picture;
13

Again, to examine the impact of non-normality on regression ndings, we also completed analyses after transforming all dependent variables in two ways, namely log and square root transformations. Overwhelmingly, we found identical numbers. Therefore, regression-based ML estimation results appeared robust to violations of normality in the data (for a discussion of this topic, see Hayduk, 1996).

416

Table IV. Set Hierarchical Regressions of Deviance (By Sex)

School misconduct M F Total deviance M F

Vandalism Ma Fb Analysis 1 Step 1: Countryc Step 2: Activitiesd Analysis 2 Step 1: Activitiesd Step 2: Countryc Total modele

Alcohol M F

Drug use M F

General M F

Theft M F

Assault M F

0.00ns 0.00* 0.12 0.08

0.03 0.13

0.11 0.10

0.02 0.17

0.02 0.14

0.01 0.11

0.03 0.09

0.01 0.14

0.02 0.12

0.01 0.11

0.01 0.07

0.00* 0.06

0.01** 0.01 0.03 0.18

0.01 0.16

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

0.12 0.09 0.13 0.00ns 0.00ns 0.03 0.12 0.09 0.16

0.10 0.11 0.21

0.18 0.01 0.19

0.15 0.01 0.16

0.10 0.02 0.12

0.10 0.02 0.12

0.14 0.01 0.15

0.13 0.02 0.15

0.12 0.08 0.07 0.03 0.00** 0.01** 0.00ns 0.00* 0.12 0.08 0.07 0.03

0.19 0.17 0.00ns 0.01 0.19 0.17

Note: Figures in this table represent R2 values; all R2 values signicant at p < 0:001 unless otherwise noted; * p < 0:05, ** p < 0:01, ns nonsignicant; age and social class were both controlled on a rst step not shown here. a Using pairwise deletion, male sample size ranged from n 3;5703,913. b Using pairwise deletion, female sample size ranged from n 2;7162,939. c Dummy-coded country variables were entered together in one set on this step. d All routine activities variables (family, peers, community, solitary) were entered together in one set on this step. e Slight dierences between sums of steps 1 and 2 and total model R2 are due to rounding error.

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors

417

Fig. 1. Venn diagram showing unique and shared amounts of variance explained by routine activities and country (by Sex).

in fact, they suggest that, after controlling for how adolescents spend their time, national context accounts for a rather large amount of variance in alcohol use, especially for females. Also, the data suggest that the drug use by country interaction also accounts for 7% and 5% for males and females respectively. These ndings suggest that individuals from dierent national contexts dier systematically with respect to factors contributing to alcohol and drug use. For example, despite the fact that alcohol use is illegal for American youth, their rates of alcohol consumption are the highest in this study. This was found for both males and females and is very consistent with recent national data which suggest that alcohol use and consumption seems to be an epidemic problem among teenagers and college students in the United States. Conversely, in the countries where alcohol use is legal for most adolescents in the current investigation, both levels of use among teenagers were lower, and country had limited additional explanatory power. One potential conclusion from these ndings is that the legal provisions to protect adolescents from the consumption of alcohol may not be achieving their desired eect. In essence, because alcohol is a forbidden fruit, youth in America develop attitudes and behaviors about alcohol that uniquely contribute to the consumption of alcohol. While a further test of this hypothesis is beyond the scope of the current investigation, we believe that dierent cultural norms and mores regarding drinking and drug use during adolescence (i.e., some cultures are more tolerant, while others are more restrictive) may be contributing to the importance of country in the explanation of both alcohol and drug use. On the relationships between routine activities and deviance, we found that routine activities accounted for 18% and 16% respectively in male and

418

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

female total deviance, although this leaves a large amount of variance in deviance unexplained. More specically, we found that how youth spend their discretionary free time after school and on weekends is associated with a number of dierent deviant behaviors ranging from vandalism to assault. We also found that spending time in the family context seemed to buer adolescents from norm-violating behaviors, while spending time with peers in unstructured and largely unsupervised activities was most predictive of deviant behaviors; this latter nding is very consistent with previous work (e.g., Agnew and Petersen, 1989; Junger and Wiegersma, 1995; Osgood et al., 1996; Riley, 1987), although it also adds to the existing evidence for youth ages 15 to 19 years. Some criminological studies have shown that juvenile delinquency is a group activity, and that oenders spend their leisure time dierently than non-oenders, namely, oenders report spending their time away from home in settings where there are few or no informal social controls (e.g., what Riley, 1987, called street time). Nonoenders, on the other hand, either spend time at home or in conventional activities that eectively insulate them from norm-violating conduct (e.g., Hirschi, 1969). Interestingly, while Riley found a weaker relationship between street time and crime for females, the current investigation suggests that variability in peer time is equally important in the prediction of deviance for both males and females. This means that spending time away from home with peers places all adolescents at risk for deviance. On this, Felson (1994) has suggested that we would expect activities which have moved away from the home to settings lacking guardianship and informal social controls to result in more crime and deviance. To compensate, people contrive settings to meet their recreational needs. These contrivances restore the lost recreation only in part and add more crime in the process (p. 112). This implies that human behavior is situational, what Felson calls the situational insight. He suggests that the process adolescents encounter is the symmetrically bad inuence, where human behavior is situational and given the right adolescent company, an individual may be more likely to commit norm violations; however, the individual may also simply be more likely to be tempted in this context. Felson (1994, p. 18) concludes that the issue is not so much bad company as adolescent company. We believe that this is what the data suggest in our study. An alternative interpretation which focuses on unidirectional inuences of peers include social learning or dierential association theory (e.g., Akers, 1977); however, our results do not directly assess time spent with deviant peers which is the central tenet of social learning theory. We also found that spending time alone or spending time in community or team sports activities buers against deviance, though the explanatory power was much smaller and the relationships inconsistent across the dierent countries, for males and females, and for the dierent types of deviance.

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors

419

In conclusion, the current study suggests that routine activities of youth in the four countries examined are quite similar. Perhaps more importantly, the study also suggests that how youth spend their time, whether males or females, appears to be related to deviance in a highly similar fashion crossnationally. In fact, with the exception of alcohol and drug use, national context had very little or no explanatory power in adolescent deviance. Therefore, the routine activities perspective seems tenable cross-nationally. In their recent article on cross-national comparative research, Farrington and Loeber (1999, p. 300) note that cross-national comparisons of risk factors for delinquency are important for addressing the question of how far the causes of delinquency are similar in dierent times and places, and hence how far theories of delinquency can be generalized over time and place. In other words, much like Farrington (1999a, 1999b) has suggested, to thoroughly examine theoretical propositions or explanatory frameworks, we need to employ cross-national comparative data. Future studies need to further explore the importance of dierent cultural and national contexts in adolescent deviance. As social scientists, we need to be interested in establishing the validity and reliability of previous research, guiding frameworks, and theories not only in a single cultural context, but across national boundaries. Ultimately, this will lead to a science of human behavior, one that is genuinely international and intercultural, one that potentially may provide evidence of developmental universals or dierences cross-nationally.

APPENDIX A In a recent cross-national comparison of teenage sexual and reproductive health across ve countries (U.S. and European countries) by the Alan Guttmacher Institute (2001), the authors suggest that beneath the generalizations necessary when making cross-national comparisons, there are often large dierences across areas and groups within a country, and varying national contexts and histories (p. 1). The same rationale applies to the current investigation. While all of these countries are currently considered economically developed and democracies (very recent for Hungary), they dier in a number of important respects from each otherlegally, politically, economically, and socially. According to the Human Development Report (United Nations Development Program, UNDP, 1996), very large dierences exist in crime perpetration and in rates of incarceration, for example, in the number of reported crimes per 100,000 people (e.g., adult rapesHungary: 1.1; Netherlands: 1.2; Switzerland: 0.4; and the United States: 90.4) or in the number of incarcerated individuals (Hungary: 132; Netherlands: 51; Switzerland: 81; and the United States: 375). A

420

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

comparison across these countries in eect is a natural experiment and comparison of low vs. high crime rate countries. Related to this, legal systems also dier dramatically, where the United States is based on English common law, while the Dutch system is based on a civil law system incorporating French penal theory. Politically, the United States and Switzerland are federal republics, while the Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy; nally, Hungary is a parliamentary democracy. Economically, these countries also report very dierent levels of ocial assistance (% of GNPHungary: 0.0; Netherlands: 0.76; Switzerland: 0.36; and the United States: 0.15). Similarly, there are also large dierences in average indicators of socioeconomic status across these countries (real GDP per capita: Hungary: $6,059; Netherlands: $17,340; Switzerland: $22,720; and the United States: $24,680). Again, the implications of these observed dierences is that they impact individual behavior and associated behavioral outcomes in members of each respective society. Lastly, these selected countries also dier greatly on a number of less tangible and measurable social qualities that may also contribute to potential dierences, both in rates of behaviors as well as in the relationships between predictors and outcome variables. For example, Switzerland and the Netherlands are very liberal with respect to tolerating dierent lifestyles and fundamental values (e.g., abortion, euthanasia, drugs, etc.); perhaps as a reection of this, these two countries are the only countries in the world that supply heroin on a medical basis to addicts. On the other hand, both Hungary and the United States are much more conservative which clearly impacts individual behavior and behavioral outcomes. Hungary has only recently instituted a democratic government after having a communist regime for the past half century. While this brief review of some key data provides a sound rationale for studying and comparing these countries, it is by no means exhaustive and only provides some brief insights into apparently large dierences between countries. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are indebted to all American, Dutch, Hungarian, and Swiss schools, administrators, and students for their cooperation in this monumental undertaking. We would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their feedback on the manuscript. REFERENCES
Agnew, R., and Petersen, D. M. (1989). Leisure and delinquency. Soc. Probl. 36: 332350. Akers, R. T. (1977). Deviant Behavior: A Social Learning Approach. Wadsworth Publishing, Belmont, CA.

Routine Activities and Deviant Behaviors

421

Alan Guttmacher Institute (2001). Can more progress be made? Teenage sexual and reproductive behavior in developed countries. Available online at: http://www.guttmacher. org/pubs/euroteens_summ.pdf Archer, D., and Gartner, R. (1984). Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Barberet, R. (2001). Global competence and American criminologyan expatriates view. Criminologist 26: 15. Bentler, P. M. (1992). On the t of models to covariances and methodology to the Bulletin. Psychol. Bull. 112: 400404. Browne, M. W., and Cudeck, R. (1993). Alternative ways of assessing model t. In Bollen, K. A., and Lond, J. S. (eds.), Testing Structural Equation Models, Sage, Newbury Park, CA, pp. 136162. Csikszentmihalyi, M., and Larson, R. (1984). Being Adolescent: Conict and Growth in the Teenage Years. Basic Books, New York. Farrington, D. P. (1988). Self-reported and ocial oending from adolescence to adulthood. In M. W. Klein (ed.), Cross-National Research in Self-Reported Crime and Delinquency. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 929964. Farrington, D. P. (1999). Explaining and preventing crime: The globalization of knowledge The American Society of Criminology Presidential Address. Criminology 38: 124. Farrington, D. P. (1999). A criminological research agenda for the next millennium. Int. J. Oender Ther. Comp. Criminol. 43: 154167. Farrington, D. P., and Loeber, R. (1999). Transatlantic replicability of risk factors in the development of delinquency. In Cohen, P., Slomkowski, C., and Robins, L. N. (eds.), Historical and Geographical Inuences on Psychopathology, Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 299 330. Felson, M. (1994). Crime and Everyday Life. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA. Felson, M., and Cohen, L. E. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. Am. Soc. Rev. 44: 588608. Felson, M., and Cohen, L. E. (1980). Human ecology and crime: A routine activity approach. Hum. Ecol. 8: 398406. Flammer, A., Alsaker, F. D., and Noack, P. (1999). Time-use by adolescents in an international perspective I. The case of leisure activities. In Alsaker, F. D., and Flammer, A. (eds.), The Adolescent Experience: European and American Adolescents in the 1990s, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 3360. Fox, J. G., and Sobol, J. J. (2000). Drinking patterns, social interaction, and barroom behavior: A routine activities approach. Dev. Behav. 21: 429450. Garfalo, J. (1987). Reassessing the lifestyle model of criminal victimization. In Gottfredson, M. R., and Hirschi, T. (eds.), Positive Criminology, Sage, Newbury Park, CA, pp. 2342. Gartner, R. (1990). The victims of homicide: A temporal and cross-national comparison. Am. Soc. Rev. 55: 92106. Gottfredson, M. R. (1981). On the etiology of criminal victimization. J. Crim. Law Criminol. 72: 714726. Gottfredson, M. R., and Hirschi, T. (1990). A General Theory of Crime, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Hawdon, J. E. (1996). Deviant lifestyles: The social control of daily routines. Youth Soc. 28: 162188. Hawdon, J. E. (1999). Daily routines and crime: Using routine activities as measures of Hirschis involvement. Youth Soc. 30: 396415. Hayduk, L. A. (1987). Structural Equation Modeling with LISREL, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.

422

Vazsonyi, Pickering, Belliston, Hessing, and Junger

Hayduk, L. A. (1996). LISREL Issues, Debates, and Strategies, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Hindelang, M. J., Gottfredson, M. R., and Garfalo, J. (1978). Victims of Personal Crime: An Empirical Foundation for a Theory of Personal Victimization, Ballinger Publishing, Cambridge, MA. Hindelang, M. J., Hirschi, T., and Weis, J. G. (1981). Measuring Delinquency, Sage, Beverly Hills, CA. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of Delinquency, University Press, Berkeley, CA. Hollingshead, A. B. (1975). Four-Factor Index of Social Status, Yale University Department of Sociology, New Haven, CT. Howard, G. J., Newman, G., and Pridemore, W. A. (2000). Theory, method, and data in comparative criminology. Crim. Justice 4: 139211. Jensen, G. F., and Browneld, D. (1986). Gender, lifestyles, and victimization: Beyond routine activity. Violence Vict. 1: 8599. Junger-Tas, J. (1988). Self-report delinquency research in Holland with a perspective on international comparison. In M. W. Klein (ed.), Cross-National Research in Self-Reported Crime and Delinquency, Kluwer Academic Publishing, Dordrecht, pp. 1742. Junger-Tas, J., and Marshall, I. H. (1999). The self-report methodology in crime research. Crime Justice 25: 291367. Junger, M., and Wiegersma, A. (1995). The relations between accidents, deviance, and leisure time. Crim. Behav. Ment. Health 5: 144173. Loehlin, J. (1992). Latent Variable Models: An Introduction to Factor, Path and Structural Analysis, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ. Mahoney, J. L., and Stattin, H. (2000). Leisure activities and adolescent antisocial behavior: The role of structure and social context. J. Adolesc. 23: 113127. Miethe, T. D., Staord, M. C., and Long, J. S. (1987). Social dierentiation in criminal victimization: A test of routine activities/lifestyle theories. Am. Soc. Rev. 52: 184194. Mott, T. E. (1988). Accommodating self-report methods to a low-delinquency culture: A longitudinal study from New Zealand. In M. W. Klein (ed.), Cross-National Research in Self-Reported Crime and Delinquency, Kluwer Academic Publishing, Dordrecht, pp. 4366. Osgood, D. W., Wilson, J. K., OMalley, P. M., Bachman, J. G., and Johnston, L. D. (1996). Routine activities and individual deviant behavior. Am. Soc. Rev. 61: 635655. Pickering, L. E., and Vazsonyi, A. T. (2002). The impact of adolescent employment on family relationships. J. Adolesc. Res. 17: 197219. Riley, D. (1987). Time and crime: The link between teenager lifestyle and delinquency. J. Quant. Criminol. 3: 339354. Rowe, D. C., Vazsonyi, A. T., and Flannery, D. J. (1994). No more than skin deep: Ethnic and racial similarity in developmental process. Psychol. Rev. 101: 396413. UNDP (1996). Human Development Report 1996. New York: Oxford University Press. Vazsonyi, A. T., and Pickering, L. E. (2000). Family processes and deviance: A comparison of apprentices and non-apprentices. J. Adolesc. Res. 15: 368391. Vazsonyi, A. T., Pickering, L. E., Junger, M., and Hessing, D. (2001). An empirical test of a general theory of crime: A four-nation comparative study of self-control and the prediction of deviance. J. Res. Crime Delinq. 38: 91131. Warr, M. (1993). Parents, peers, and delinquency. Soc. Forces 72: 247264. Wittebrood, K., and Nieuwbeerta, P. (2000). Criminal victimization during ones life course: The eects of the previous victimization and patterns of routine activities. J. Res. Crime Delinq. 37: 91122.

Copyright of Journal of Quantitative Criminology is the property of Springer Science & Business Media B.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.