COMMUNITY SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION AND ADOLESCENT PROPERTY CRIME IN ICELAND

Jón Gunnar Bernburg, University of Iceland

Thorolfur Thorlindsson, University of Iceland

ABSTRACT

During the past two decades, criminology has seen the reappearance of research focusing on the influence of local community structure on delinquency and crime. The theoretical backbone of this research has been social disorganization theory, originally developed by Shaw and McKay’s (1969 [1942]). The distinctive contribution of this classical sociological approach is the focusing on the local community as having emergent, social structural qualities influencing the salience of social control among community residents, particularly of adolescents. The present study contributes to this literature in several ways. First, by operationalizing disorganization theory in Iceland, we examine its cross-societal generalizability. Research informed by social disorganization theory has been rare outside of United States and Britain. Second, using multilevel data on school communities and individual adolescents, we examine the contextual effects of community structure on adolescent property crime. Examining contextual effects is important since community-level relationships may simply reflect the aggregation of individual-level relationships. Finally, we extend and elaborate on the theory by focusing on the mechanisms that mediate the effect of community structure on delinquency. Thus we focus on intergenerational closure (ties linking community parents and adolescents), normlessness, and unsupervised peer activity. The findings show that community social instability has a contextual effect on adolescent property crime, and that intergenerational closure and normlessness account for a part of this effect. Moreover, the community levels of social instability and intergenerational closure condition the effect of unsupervised peer activity on offending.