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Impulsivity, Offending, and the Neighborhood: Investigating the Person–Context Nexus

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Abstract

The traditional trait-based approach to the study of crime has been challenged for its failure to acknowledge differences in the social environments to which individuals are exposed. Similarly, community-level explanations of crime have been criticized for failing to take into account important individual differences between criminals and non-criminals. Ultimately, a full understanding of crime requires the consideration of both individual and environmental differences, perhaps most importantly because they may interact to produce offending behavior. Yet little criminological research has examined if the effects of individual-level characteristics vary by the context in which they are embedded. The current study addresses this gap in the literature by using multivariate, multilevel item response models to examine if the influence of impulsivity on offending differs as a function of neighborhood context. Analyses using data from the Project of Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods reveals that the effects of impulsivity are amplified in neighborhoods with higher levels of socioeconomic status and collective efficacy, and lower levels of criminogenic behavior settings and moral/legal cynicism. Implications of these findings for research and policy are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Studies focusing on victimization have also found significant interactions between individual- and community-level characteristics. For example, Miethe and McDowall (1993) found that key routine activities variables have a significant effect on burglary in more affluent areas, but little effect in socially disorganized communities; Rountree et al. (1994) found evidence that individual-level crime opportunity variables interact with neighborhood context to influence violent victimization and burglary; and Velez (2001) found that public social control has a stronger effect on household/personal victimization in more disadvantaged neighborhoods.

  2. Response rates for wave one were 74.3 and 71.6% for the 12- and 15-year-old cohorts, respectively. At wave two, response rates were 86.2 and 82.7%, respectively. Analysis of attrition revealed that participants dropping out of the study were not significantly different than those remaining in the study. In addition, missing data consisted only of 43 participants without valid impulsivity data, representing 3.5% of the sample. Since impulsivity is the key variable in this study, missing impulsivity data was not imputed to protect the validity of the results. However, multiple imputation techniques in Stata (the ICE command) were used to examine potential bias resulting from missing impulsivity data (Royston 2005). Results were not significantly altered using these techniques.

  3. The ten items composing this scale are from the Achenbach Child-Behavior Checklist (CBCL; see Achenbach 1993). Although the scales in the CBCL are normed by sex, the CBCL does not have a preformed index of impulsivity. Therefore, the ten individual items composing the scale were standardized and summed by the researcher.

  4. Previous research has shown that perseverance is not as strongly related to offending as other types of impulsivity (i.e., lack of premeditation, urgency, and sensation seeking) (see Lynam and Miller 2004, for a review of different types of impulsivity; also see Whiteside et al. 2005). Further, the impulsivity index used in this study may tap into a related psychological construct: hyperactivity. These limitations, discussed in detail below, may have numerous implications: lower correlations between impulsivity and offending than in previous studies; results qualitatively and quantitatively different than other studies; and less variability in impulsivity scores in certain neighborhoods.

  5. I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the lack of face validity of certain items in the scale.

  6. The second extracted component consisted of the remaining seven items and explained 44% of the variance in the items (eigenvalue = 1.82). The correlation between the two components was 0.61.

  7. Seven of the ten items used to construct the scale were repeated at wave two. The discussion that follows pertains to analysis of these items at waves one and two.

  8. Sensitivity analyses confirmed the neighborhood classification scheme for all of the neighborhood variables. The results did not vary when neighborhood variables were trichotomized by 1/3 splits or 10-80-10 splits. Further, the results were consistent when the neighborhood variables were continuous. For example, the effect of impulsivity (.039) on offending was amplified by .050 units for every standard deviation increase of SES (p < .01). The variables were ultimately trichotomized for ease of interpretability. .

  9. Sensitivity analysis was conducted to confirm that the findings were not due to the operationalization of the dependent variable or the model used. In one model, the violent and property crime items were combined additively (α = .62 and α = .50, respectively); these scales were highly correlated (r = 0.50). Two-level hierarchical linear models were estimated with these scales as dependent variables. In a second model, individuals were coded with a one if they responded affirmatively to any one of the violent and property crime items, respectively, and zero otherwise, and two-level multilevel logistic models were estimated. The results of these models were consistent with those presented below.

  10. Two major assumptions of the model are: (1) additivity: item severities and person propensities contribute additively to the log-odds of a positive item response; and (2) local independence: conditional on item severity and person propensity, item responses are independent Bernoulli random variables. These assumptions imply unidimensionality; that is, each set of item responses taps a single interval-scale construct, in this case, “the propensity to commit (violent and property) crime” (Raudenbush et al. 2003, pp. 177). In addition, the model provides (1) an ordering of the items, in terms of act severity, and (2) a score for each individual on the latent trait; these scores lie on the same scale and can be compared across individuals.

  11. For illustrative purposes, the violent and property crime scales are constructed here as additive indices. As indicated above, the items actually serve as level-one variables in the multilevel item response model.

  12. Given the relatively weak correlation between impulsivity and crime, stronger individual-level correlates of crime were considered. These include peer influence and self-control. The correlations between these factors and offending were generally consistent with those found in previous research (e.g., Pratt and Cullen 2000; Warr 2002).

  13. Between-person reliabilities are 0.65 and 0.54, for the violent and property crime models, respectively. The between-neighborhood reliabilities are 0.32 and 0.08. Not surprisingly, the between-neighborhood reliability for property crime is close to zero (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002, pp. 46–66).

  14. Although it seems to be an anomaly that violent crime is more pervasive than property crime, the two most prevalent offenses in the sample are hitting someone and throwing objects, relatively minor incidents representing violent crime.

  15. An alternative approach would be to first test the significance of a random slope variance on impulsivity, and subsequently think of neighborhood-level variables that could explain the random slope. However, basing the cross-level interactions on a priori substantive arguments is preferable. The power of the statistical tests of the cross-level interaction fixed effects is considerably higher than the power of tests based on the random slopes. In addition, one can test these interactions irrespective of whether a random slope on impulsivity is found (see Snijders and Bosker 1999, pp. 74–75, 95–96).

  16. The results in Table 7 and Figs. 1 and 2 were consistent across scales and are available upon request.

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Acknowledgments

This research uses data from the Project of Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) and was supported by Grant No. 2008-IJ-CX-0006 awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice. Findings and conclusions of the research reported here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the US Department of Justice.

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    Gregory M. Zimmerman

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Zimmerman, G.M. Impulsivity, Offending, and the Neighborhood: Investigating the Person–Context Nexus. J Quant Criminol 26, 301–332 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-010-9096-4

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