Chad Posick

Georgia Southern University | GSU · College of Behavioral and Social Sciences

Research suggests that direct exposure (personal victimization) and indirect exposure (witnessing or hearing about the victimization of a family member, friend, or neighbor) to violence are correlated. However, questions remain about the co-occurrence of these phenomena within individuals. We used data on 1915 youths (with an average age of 12 year...

For much of the history of criminology, tension has existed between sociologically oriented and biologically oriented perspectives. In recent years, a new, more nuanced approach has emerged which attempts to take both perspectives seriously and integrate them into a biosocial criminology. Yet, it remains, in large part, a fringe field of study. We...

Criminology has traditionally been primarily focused on adolescent male criminality given the perception that most violent crime is perpetrated by boys in their early teens. However, this view neglects the considerable amount of evidence that violent behavior is manifest very early in the life course and that risk factors for violent behavior exist...

Exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) is a significant public health issue for youth. However, traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been almost entirely overlooked in the ACEs and health outcomes literature, which has largely focused on the significant mental and behavioral health impact of ACEs. The goal the current study is to examine the...

We test two major hypotheses in this article: (a) macrolevels of school disorganization and individual levels of low self-control will be directly, and positively, linked to victimization and (bi) low self-control will have the largest impact on exposure to victimization (ETV) when it interacts with negative environments consistent with a social en...

This special issue of the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology intends to expand the examination of victimology and victim issues. The social problem of violence is universal, and there is much to learn from policies and programs that are found to be effective across the globe. The four issues in this special issue...

Purpose The negative health consequences of physical and sexual assault are fairly well established, yet factors related to the context of assaults are less recognized. This study examines the role of the age of onset of physical and sexual assault on overall perceptions of health and autonomy over health. Methods Using a follow-up of the original...

This chapter provides an overview of issues in desistance research with a focus on definitions, methods, and analytic frameworks. It provides a very brief overview of what is known about desistance from crime. Perhaps the most consistent finding is that for adults who have been engaged in criminal acts, a strong marriage can lead to desistance. The...

Research has linked various constructs with a shared focus on the future to suicidal behavior. This study examined: (1) whether life expectancy and expectations for future health were associated with reduced odds of suicidal ideation and attempted suicide, and (2) whether the reducing effect of having high levels of future expectations on suicidal...

The impact of COVID-19 has been felt by all facets of the criminal justice system and victim services agencies. The ability to monitor and report maltreatment has been severely limited for organizations that work with children of abuse and neglect; this is particularly troubling given that abuse and neglect are likely to rise during times of distre...

Traditionally, criminological research on impulsivity and crime assumes impulsivity is a uniform construct that is positively related to deviant behavior. However, psychological research on impulsivity indicates that the construct may have multiple forms, which vary in their relationship to antisocial behavior. One possibility that few studies have...

Sexual and physical assaults have many serious and persistent negative impacts on individual health. There is now a considerable literature base identifying and discussing these health outcomes. Less is known about the mediating mechanisms that link these types of assault with later outcomes. This study examines the role of sexual and physical assa...

Neighborhood characteristics have been associated with various facets of children's health. This study explored whether adverse neighborhood conditions-particularly violence exposure and perceptions of danger-were associated with child health status and health risks across four dimensions: health difficulties (for example, headaches, stomachaches,...

Sample: Youths reported the extent to which they consumed energy drinks. Additionally, three indicators of property victimization and four indicators of violent victimization were available in the data. The findings reveal a significant dose-response relationship between energy drink consumption and victimization. This relationship was especially...

A long line of research has uncovered a link between depression and delinquency. However, much of this research has been unable to disentangle the temporal ordering of the depression and crime relationship. In addition, few studies have examined potential mediating relationships between depression and crime, including, for example, theoretical vari...

Stemming from the work of Schreck (1999), criminological frameworks have increasingly been reframed to explore victimization experiences. Given developmental and situational changes over time, Agnew’s integrated theory of crime and delinquency provides a potentially profitable framework for explaining victimization that has remained relatively unex...

The current study focuses on predominant predictors associated with men’s and women’s engagement in driving under the influence (DUI) in an attempt to determine whether gender-specific interventions would be more affective at reducing impaired vehicle operation. A male-only subsample (n = 863) and a female-only subsample (n = 975) from a survey adm...

Objective: The expansion of technology enables closer examination of human biological functioning which has exponentially increased knowledge about how the human organism interacts with surrounding environs to produce certain behaviors. The contemporary biosocial model pushes crime theorists and researchers alike to consider the many biological fac...

Crime after World War II spiked in the United States, leaving many scholars of crime puzzled as to its causes. Using official crime statistics and data from newly developed self-report surveys, analysts began to unravel the relationship between an individual's lifestyle and daily activities and their risk of victimization. The data revealed that as...

Existing evidence clearly supports an empirical connection between offending and victimization. Often called the “victim–offender overlap,” this relationship holds for both sexes, across the life course, and across a wide range of countries and cultural environments. In addition, the relationship is sustained regardless of the study sample and stat...

Simon Singer’s [1] America’s Safest City represents a new and innovative contribution to the criminological literature. It not only provides a fresh look at understanding crime in America, it sheds the light on a heretofore understudied part of the country, but one that is increasingly populated: Suburbia. Singer offers a new theoretical perspectiv...

Purpose Police-community relations are currently at a cross-road. Incidents over the past several years have severely damaged trust and faith in the police – particularly in minority communities. Society is faced with the choice of accepting an “us-vs-them” mentality with police on one side and citizens on the other or banding together to advance p...

Purpose There is widespread interest in moving beyond crime statistics to measure police performance in new ways, especially the quality of police-community interactions that influence police legitimacy and public trust. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Police-Community Interaction Survey (PCIS) developed by the National Police Researc...

Purpose There is widespread interest in moving beyond crime statistics to measure police performance in new ways, especially the quality of police-community interactions that influence police legitimacy and public trust. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Police-Community Interaction Survey (PCIS) developed by the National Police Researc...

Opinion editorial on the theory of the Ferguson Effect arguing that crime is increasing because of protests in Ferguson, MO written for the Bangor Daily News, July 8, 2015

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a pervasive problem in the United States affecting every demographic group. Victims of IPV suffer a wide range of negative health issues including depression, anxiety, and loss of self-esteem. However, little is known about help-seeking behaviors among IPV victims. This study utilized a university sample to explor...

Purpose With an increase in longitudinal datasets and analyses, scholars have made theoretical advances toward understanding desistance using biological, social, and psychological factors. In an effort to integrate the theoretical views on desistance, some scholars have argued that each of these views represents a piece of adult maturation. Yet to...

The relationship between age and crime is one of the oldest known in the criminological literature. This entry describes research on what is known as the “age–crime curve,” first by reviewing recent data, then discussing historical and theoretical work. The entry then discusses policy implications of the age and crime research. These implications d...

In the United States, children who are abused or neglected are granted special representation in court. This representation can be in the form of a guardian ad litem or a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA). Unlike guardian ad litems, CASAs are unpaid volunteers with exceptionally low caseloads (usually, less than five cases per volunteer at an...

Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender (LGBT) students has been gaining traction in the fields of criminology, victimology, and education, but available data lag behind the demand for studies on this underserved population. While LGBT students are often perceived to face greater risk of victimization and subsequent health problems th...

Culture has been implicated in a wide range of individual behaviors. However, empirical investigation of how culture impacts violent behavior is limited. In particular, the well-established finding that there is an overlap between offenders and victims has not been examined in a culturally comparative context - limiting the ability to generalize cu...

For over 30 years, the criminal career paradigm in criminology has raised important theoretical and policy questions as well as research on the 'dimensions' of the criminal career (for example, onset, duration, lambda, persistence, chronicity, desistance). Yet few studies have examined criminal career dimensions using a cross-national comparative a...

Social control theories provide a sound theoretical basis for why crime doesn’t happen (or more precisely, why conformity is the norm). It is surprising then that the vast majority of all efforts to study control theories’ major tenets examine areas high in crime. In his book America’s Safest City: Delinquency and Modernity in Suburbia, Singer prov...

Some of the most enduring structural theories of crime center on the existence of a criminal subculture. Several ecological theories have attempted to explain the etiology of subcultures, but few have endured the rigors of empirical investigation, and shortcomings of these perspectives remain. To date, subcultural theories have neglected to examine...

Objectives To introduce and evaluate the Police–Citizen Interaction (PCI) Survey, the electronic survey component of the National Police Research Platform, designed to measure the quality of police–citizen encounters at the local level. Methods Three studies tested the feasibility, validity, and sample representativeness of the PCI Survey. A random...

Research examining desistance from crime (the process of decreasing offending over time) has increased over the last 20 years. However, many explanations of desistance remain somewhat exploratory. One theory in particular that is becoming more prominent includes the idea that desistance is caused by a change in identity (e.g. from deviant to pro-so...

Research that attempts to document racial or gender disparities in the criminal justice system inevitably paints a distorted picture if only one point in the criminal justice process is examined. For example, studies that look at who is sentenced to death among a group convicted of first-degree murder will miss exposure of biases that occur at earl...

Objectives Neighborhood youth organizations are a salient community-level resource in the lives of children and adolescents, but empirical research on the aggregate-level rela-tionship between neighborhood crime rates and neighborhood organizations is mixed. This study attempts to clarify and extend prior research by examining (1) whether there is...

An increasing problem of great concern for academic institutions around the world is the pervasiveness of academic cheating among students. However, there is a dearth of prior research on cheating in cross-national contexts. The present study examines the relationships between structural measures of strain and principals’ reports of problematic che...

Objectives: To determine whether the relationship between marriage and crime extends beyond the individual level of analysis by examining the relationship between marriage rates and crime rates at the county level. Methods: Linear regression analyses of marriage rates on various types of crime, including violent, property, drug, and juvenile crime...

Purpose: Research suggests that interpersonal violence and suicidal behavior often co-occur and share a common set of risk factors. This study examined (1) the extent to which individuals specialize in interpersonal violence or suicidal behavior and (2) the shared and unique covariates of individual specialization. Methods: The Project on Human...

The correlation between victimization and offending (i.e., the victim-offender overlap) is one of the most documented empirical findings in delinquency research, leading researchers to investigate potential contingencies in this relationship. A small number of studies have found evidence of contextual variation in the victim-offender overlap, but t...

Family bonding is a mainstay in theories of crime and delinquency. Recently, it has also been extended to explain exposure to victimization in the US and abroad. Although research reveals that there are differences between countries in their views about the importance of family, scholarship has not yet considered how and why the protective features...

Research finds that males are more likely to engage in delinquency than females. General strain theory (GST) suggests that males and females experience different emotions in response to strain leading to different deviant outcomes. Tests of GST to account for this issue are mixed, perhaps due to the reliance on measures that fail to take into accou...

Gottfredson and Hirschi's self-control theory is one of the most empirically tested explanations of criminal behavior. Yet questions remain about the operationalization of self-control. Researchers have examined the relationship between self-control and crime predominantly with the Grasmick et al. (199318. Grasmick , Harold G. , Charles R. Tittle...

Research consistently shows that minorities have less confidence in the police and perceive less procedural justice during encounters than Whites. This work generally concludes that the differences in perceptions by race are due to actual differences in attitudes, then proceeds to explore the origins of these differences. However, scholarly work ha...

Correctional researchers have increasingly focused on social bonding as a key pathway by which parolees desist from crime after release. Most work to date has focused on levels of bonds, either at reentry or as a function of events occurring in the community. However, few have assessed whether the magnitude of change in bonds during incarceration h...

Objective: Current research has suggested that characteristics of the victim (e.g., sex, race, age) and situational factors (e.g., injury, relationship to the offender) influence police reporting. Questions remain as to what other variables influence police reporting as well as the particular motivational mechanisms that move victims, and others, t...

One longstanding research interest of criminology that has seen resurgence of late is the relationship between offending and victimization. This line of research reveals that offending and victimization are not randomly distributed among the population but clustered within the same individuals. These individuals share similar individual characteris...

Although law enforcement agencies, policymakers, and communities have had to confront the issue of increasing metal theft for the past several years, almost no academic literature has attempted to examine the correlates of metal theft and subsequent policy implications. This exploratory study profiles the theft of metal from commercial and resident...

Empathy is related, directly or indirectly, to important elements in criminology such as the enactment of harsh penalties for repeat offenders, antisocial behavior, feelings of legitimacy toward the law, and attitudes toward the death penalty. Although empathy is beginning to find its way into criminological discourse, it is still not well understo...