Changes in criminal thinking from midadolescence to early adulthood: Does trajectory direction matter?

Although there is evidence of a strong age-crime relationship, there is little consensus as to why crime peaks in midadolescence and drops off in late adolescence or early adulthood, and there is virtually no information on how age interacts with other crime-related variables such as criminal thinking. The purpose of this study was to document changes in the age-criminal thinking relationship from midadolescence to early adulthood and determine whether these changes were capable of predicting future offending behavior.

It was hypothesized that (a) criminal thinking, measured with a moral disengagement scale, would gradually decelerate as offending youth progressed from midadolescence to early adulthood; (b) downward-sloping trajectories obtained from a growth mixture modeling (GMM) analysis would predominate over upward-sloping and stable trajectories, and (c) the direction of a trajectory (upward or downward sloping) would have as much impact on future offending as the overall magnitude of moral disengagement.

These three hypotheses were tested in a group of 1,273 (1,093 male, 180 female) serious juvenile offenders from the Pathways to Desistance study who completed a moral disengagement scale annually between the ages of 16 and 22. The data were then subjected to trend analysis, GMM, and an analysis of covariance whereby trajectory class membership served to predict future offending.

Scores on the moral disengagement scale dropped gradually from age 16 to 22, GMM identified four latent classes, 93.6% of the sample fell into one of two decelerating trajectory patterns, and trajectory direction was at least as important as trajectory magnitude in predicting future offending.

Trajectory direction appears to be as important as magnitude in evaluating the clinical significance of changes in criminal thinking during mid to late adolescence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).