Frank M. Weerman

Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR)

Although community sanctions have become a popular alternative to custodial sanctions in youth justice, primary questions about the recidivism effects of community sanctions remain un-answered. The current study aims to fill this gap through a quasi-experimental analysis of 2-year recidivism differences between 4,425 youth subject to community sanc...

Although community sanctions have become a popular alternative to custodial sanctions in youth justice, primary questions about the recidivism effects of community sanctions remain unanswered. In this study we used matching techniques to conduct a quasi-experimental analysis of 2-year recidivism differences between 4,593 youth subject to community...

Police officers are often the victim of aggression by citizens, which has negative consequences for them and society in general. Therefore, it is important to gain knowledge about related factors. This study examines to what extent experiencing aggression as a police officer is related to their patience with citizens and use of force weapons and to...

Deze studie richt zich op het ontstaan van radicalisering in de vroege adolescentie en de rol die het onderwijs kan spelen bij het voorkomen radicalisering en polarisatie. Het uitgangspunt was om daarbij aan te sluiten bij de identiteitsontwikkeling in de adolescentie en de wijze waarop het onderwijs bijdraagt aan de ontwikkeling van (sociale) comp...

Dit hoofdstuk biedt een overzicht van de literatuur over preventieprogramma’s ter voorkoming van radicalisering die bedoeld zijn voor het onderwijs. We bespreken zowel internationale als nationale preventieprogramma’s waarbij in ieder geval een vorm van evaluatie heeft plaatsgevonden. Programma's met een pedagogische insteek staan daarbij centraal....

Politiemedewerkers maken regelmatig agressie door burgers mee, met veel negatieve gevolgen voor henzelf en de samenleving. Het is daarom van belang om meer zicht te krijgen in de factoren die ermee samenhangen. In deze studie wordt onderzocht in hoe-verre agressie-ervaringen van politiemedewerkers samenhangen met hun geduld met burgers en gebruik v...

Hardly any research exists that empirically compares (near-)domestic and cross-border sex trafficking. The few studies that do, are based on relatively small samples, and only represent US data. This study substantially extends the scarce scientific knowledge about the differences between the two types of sex trafficking, based on European data. Ou...

Since the early 1990s, increasing attention is being paid to the impact of life course transitions on criminal behavior. However, individuals’ life courses do not evolve in a vacuum but rather in the broad context of societal characteristics and developments. In this paper, we analyze whether there is an effect of macroeconomic circumstances on ind...

https://research.vu.nl/files/149641924/PUBLISHED_Understanding_cybercriminal_behaviour_among_young_people.pdf

Newsmedia have regularly reported about acts of terrorism that involved members of the same family, but also about instances where one sibling becomes a terrorist, whereas the other becomes a successful, law-abiding citizen. The question is, then, to what extent family circumstances and individual risk factors impact on pathways towards these share...

This meta-analysis examines the official recidivism effects of two types of community sanctions in youth justice, namely community service and behavioural intervention programmes. Two analyses were conducted: a comparison between the effects of community sanctions and custodial sanctions, versus a comparison between the effects of community sanctio...

Objectives: Despite abundant attention to offending specialization in criminology, scholars have only recently started to explore opportunity-driven explanations for within-individual patterns of specialization. The current study examines whether unstructured socializing with specific friends can explain within-individual changes in adolescents’ de...

Objectives The current study seeks to explain changes in support for violent extremism during the transition to early adulthood. This period during the life course could increase uncertainty and vulnerability to radicalization, or alternatively lead to maturation, prosocial bonds, and consequently less support for violent extremism. In the absence...

Objectives Despite abundant attention to offending specialization in criminology, scholars have only recently started to explore opportunity-driven explanations for within-individual patterns of specialization. The current study examines whether unstructured socializing with specific friends can explain within-individual changes in adolescents’ deg...

The aim of the current study is to provide an empirical test of containment theory of Walter Reckless (1899–1988). The theory proposes that outer and inner containment hold adolescents back from delinquency even when external factors pull and push them toward it. This early control theory was ahead of its time, but never received the empirical atte...

In this chapter, we presents the results from a multi-method study in the Netherlands into the role of socio-economic and psychological factors underlying terrorism involvement. Building on theories and findings of previous researchers in the field, we present a descriptive model of terrorism that categorizes distal and proximal ‘threat triggers’....

Although many studies have investigated the backgrounds of people who went to Syria to join jihadist groups, much remains unclear about the underlying radicalisation processes. Many authors have noted that radicalisation and terrorism are associated with involvement in crime (the crime-terror nexus), in particular with membership of delinquent grou...

The ubiquity of the internet and social media has influenced the lives of people across the globe, including young people involved in street gangs and troublesome youth groups. This development raises important questions about the causes, features, and consequences of online gang behavior, as well as the consequences of this new phenomenon for gang...

In dit onderzoek is onderzocht welke relatie er bestaat tussen problematische jeugdgroepen in Nederland en radicalisering.

Purpose This study aimed to explore whether and how sibling delinquency affects adolescent delinquency, over and beyond the effects of other social domains such as parents, school, and peers, and whether this sibling effect is time-varying over the course of adolescence. Methods Six waves of data from the “Research on Adolescents Development And R...

Objectives To analyze short-term changes in peer affiliations, offending behavior and routine activities in order to evaluate three different processes: peer selection, peer socialization and situational peer influences. Methods The short-term longitudinal TEENS study was conducted among a cohort of students from one mid-sized high school in Kentuc...

Current study has two main goals. First, it proposes the threat model of terrorism to investigate socio-economic, cultural and psychological determinants of terrorism. Second, it tests the threat model on different sets of quantitative data, such as police data on suspects of terrorism, register data on changes in socio-economic circumstance, as we...

Research on terrorism/extremism, conducted by the members of Extremism/Terrorism Cluster NSCR from July 2016 to October 2017.

Purpose The literature on terrorism suggests a strong link between criminal offending and terrorism – the crime-terror nexus. Building upon a strain theory perspective, we suggest that devalued socio-economic status (i.e. limited education and unemployment) and criminal past define the pool of people from which violent and terror offenders may be...

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Morality, and particularly the capacity to experience shame and/or guilt, may be viewed as sediments of early experiences with the commitment of acts of crime and rule-breaking and the consequences of these acts. This chapter addresses the specific roles of moral beliefs and moral emotions such as shame and guilt and how they are related to crimina...

Objectives We examined the extent to which different aspects of parenting are able to moderate the association between spending time unstructured socializing (US) in urban areas with high disorder and adolescent delinquency. Methods We used detailed data on time use, disorder in neighborhoods, parenting, and delinquency among 603 adolescents (aged...

In this study we examine to what extent within-individual changes in parental monitoring, bonds with parents and school, and rule-breaking peers can explain within-individual changes in morality. We distinguish between three key dimensions of morality: moral values, anticipated shame, and anticipated guilt. We use data from the SPAN project, a two-...

The relationship between unstructured socializing (peer-oriented activity without supervision) and adolescent delinquency is widely established and recognized, but less is known about why this relationship exists. The present study integrates the unstructured socializing perspective with insights from social learning theory and other theoretical pe...

Situational Action Theory (SAT) is a recently developed general action theory of crime that integrates and synthesizes existing individual and ecological explanations. SAT explicitly states that the individual’s propensity for criminal behaviour (morality and self-control) and exposure to criminogenic settings (rule breaking peers and time spent in...

The study of gangs in the United States has a long history dating back to the works of Riis, Puffer, and Thrasher. This chapter compares the United States to Europe, mostly in broad terms. First, it examines if there are gangs outside the United States, if they engage in criminal activities, and what group characteristics they have. Next, the chapt...

This paper investigates to what extent a recent perspective in criminology, Situational Action Theory, is valid for both males and females and to what extent elements from the theory explain gender differences in delinquency. Data are used from the first (N = 843) and second (N = 616) wave of the Study of Peers, Activities, and Neighborhoods, which...

This study examined all group sexual offending cases in the Netherlands between 1995 and 2009 (n = 26) in which at least one juvenile female offender (n = 35) had been adjudicated. Information from court files showed that the majority of juvenile female group sexual offenders have (inter)personal problems and (sexual) abuse experiences. The aims of...

This study explores how gang membership transitions among adolescents are related to changes with regard to peers, conventional social bonds and problem behaviour. The data come from two longitudinal studies, one conducted in the United States (the Rochester Youth Development Study) and one in the Netherlands (the NSCR School Study). In both countr...

This article reviews the Space-Time Budget method developed by Wikström and colleagues and particularly discusses its relevance for criminological research. The Space-Time Budget method is a data collection instrument aimed at recording, retrospectively, on an hour-by-hour basis, the whereabouts and activities of respondents during four days in the...

Criminological studies of contextual effects on adolescent offending have focused either on residential areas (considering effects of characteristics like disadvantage and collective efficacy) or on school characteristics (studying effects of organisation and social climate, for example). However, adolescents are simultaneously exposed to multiple...

Deviant behavior tends to be more strongly correlated with respondents’ perceptions of peer deviance than with actual peer deviance. However, research has yet to discern between two interpretations of this finding. On one hand, respondent perceptions of peer deviance may simply be “biased” indicators of actual peer behavior or alternative measures...

Purpose: This study aimed to test whether adolescents’ delinquency is related to the geographic, functional and social diversity of the behavior settings that they are exposed to. Methods: Data were collected in a two-wave panel study amongst 616 adolescents. In the first wave, diversity was measured using a space-time budget interview recording th...

Situational theories of crime assert that the situations that people participate in contain the proximal causes of crime. Prior research has not tested situational hypotheses rigorously, either for lack of detailed situational data or for lack of analytical rigor. The present research combines detailed situational data with analytical methods that...

The strong correlation between measures of personal and peer deviance occurs with near “law-like” regularity. Yet, as with other manifestations of peer similarity (often referred to as homophily), the mechanisms generating this relationship are widely debated. Specific to the deviance literature, most studies have failed to examine, simultaneously,...

Six different social disorganization models of neighbourhood crime and offender rates were tested using data from multiple sources in the city of The Hague, in the Netherlands. The sources included a community survey among 3,575 residents in 86 neighbourhoods measuring the central concepts of the six models. The data were aggregated to ecologically...

This article examines how actors' perceptions of other people's behavior may be exaggerated and how this inaccuracy may influence behavior. More specifically, we apply these issues to improve our understanding of the correlation between delinquency of friends and individual delinquency. This relationship is one of the most replicated findings in th...

This study aims to identify the locations where unstructured socializing is related to adolescent offending. 'Locations' refer to private, semi-public and public spaces, which are further categorized into public entertainment, public transportation, other semi-public settings, streets, shopping centres and open spaces. Detailed longitudinal data, d...

Research has shown that time spent with peers is related to delinquency, but little is known about the conditions under which spending time with peers is most related to delinquent behavior. In this study, we contrast different categories of time spent with peers, using detailed information about the activities and whereabouts of 843 adolescents in...

PurposePrevious research on changes in self-control during adolescence provides evidence of stability for most individuals but change for some, drawing attention to the role of factors that may account for change. We contribute to this area of research by examining the extent to which changes in peer self-control and peer delinquency within peer ne...

Criminological attention toward girls in gangs has increased substantially in the past few decades, but studies outside the United States on sex differences with regard to gangs are still scarce. In this chapter, data from a Dutch survey of 1,830 adolescents are used to investigate membership in troublesome youth groups among girls as compared to b...

While a growing number of longitudinal studies contribute to our knowledge on the relationship between delinquent peers and one’s own delinquent behavior, researchers have generally approached the issue in a restricted way: failing to identify mediating processes or to distinguish between what peers approve of and what they do. Moreover, most studi...

In this article, we investigate sex differences in the relationship between peers and delinquency. We analyse to what extent peers have different effects on delinquency among girls and boys, and to what extent sex differences in the level of delinquency can be explained by differential exposure or vulnerability to criminogenic peer contexts. Data a...

In this study we examine whether feelings of anticipated shame and anticipated guilt when being caught for an offence mediate the relationship between parental monitoring, bonds with parents and school, deviant peers, moral values and offending. We use data from the SPAN project, a study that collected detailed information about offending, moral em...

Deterrence studies have shown that perceived sanction risk is related to delinquent behaviour, independent of other variables, and that this relation may be conditioned by individual propensity towards crime. The principal goal of this study is to assess these findings with data from a sample of 843 Dutch adolescents. First, we analysed whether per...

Peer delinquency is a robust correlate of delinquent and criminal behavior. However, debate continues to surround the proper measurement of peer delinquency. Recent research suggests that some respondents are likely to misrepresent their peers’ involvement in delinquency when asked in survey questionnaires, drawing into question the traditional (i....

In this article, longitudinal social network data are analyzed to get a better understanding of the interplay between delinquent peers and delinquent behavior. These data contain detailed information about the social networks of secondary school students from the same grade, their delinquent behavior, and many relevant correlates of network formati...

This study focuses on delinquent behaviour after secondary school, and investigates the relationship with different educational careers. More specifically, it analyses whether delinquent behaviour increases or decreases among young people with subsequent full-time schooling (without and with educational problems), youths who are working full time o...

In this paper, we investigate attitude—behaviour inconsistency as well as the effect of social norms and other peer-related factors on the translation of attitudes into behaviour. We draw upon social psychological perspectives, in particular from the social identity approach. Data were used from two waves of 1385 secondary school students in the Sc...

This study examines whether morality and self-control have an interactional effect on offending. Drawing from the situational action theory, the authors hypothesize that self-control has a more important effect on offending for individuals with low levels of morality than for individuals with high levels of morality. To test this hypothesis, self-r...

The co-evolution of friendship relations and delinquent behaviour among Dutch adolescents .This article focuses on two research questions. To what degree is similarity in delinquent behaviour among Dutch secondary school students explained by selection and influence processes? And to what extent is the effect of friends’ delinquency on adolescents’...

Prior research examining the effect of self-control and delinquent peers on crime suggests that both variables are strong correlates and that controlling for one fails to eliminate the effects of the other. Yet prior research was based on indirect and possibly biased indicators of peer delinquency. Recent research using direct measures of delinquen...

Vijftig jaar geleden verscheen het Tijdschrift voor Criminologie voor de eerste keer. Het heeft zich ontwikkeld tot een peer reviewed tijdschrift met kwalitatief en kwantitatief onderzoek van hoge kwaliteit. Jeugd-en levensloopcriminologie, onderzoek naar georga-niseerde en organisatiecriminaliteit, criminografisch onderzoek en onderzoek naar gewel...

This “Eurogang Manual” contains information about the background of the Eurogang Program of Research and offers additional guidelines for the use of the Eurogang instruments. It is intended as a companion to the Eurogang instruments, which are available for viewing at http://www.umsl.edu/~ccj/eurogang/instruments.htm. This manual is provided as an...

This paper describes the development and validation of a dynamic multi-agent model to simulate social learning of adolescence-limited criminal behaviour. The parameters of the agent model have been calibrated using real-world data that has been collected in a large study. In addition, a measure for correctness has been developed. The validation sho...

This article focuses on two research questions. To what degree is similarity in delinquent behaviour among Dutch secondary school students explained by selection and influence processes? And to what extent is the effect of friends’ delinquency on adolescents’ delinquency level moderated by characteristics of the friendship relation? Hypotheses were...