Maternal Risk Factors, Early Life Events, and Deviant Outcomes: Assessing Antisocial Pathways from Birth through Adolescence

摘要

The life-course perspective has been instrumental in exploring relationships between early life circumstances, childhood problem behaviors, and adolescent and adult offending. This dissertation focuses on three areas that are central to the life-course perspective, (a) the development of childhood antisocial behavior, (b) factors that foster the stability of antisocial behavior, and (c) debate over the existence of multiple routes to delinquency. Particular research questions focus on (a) whether biosocial interactions predict childhood antisocial behavior, (b) whether processes of cumulative continuity account for stability in antisocial behavior, and (c) whether discrete offender groups differ on risk markers for delinquency. This research uses a sample of 1030 individuals fiom the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Mother-Child data set to examine the onset and persistence of antisocial behavior. Negative Binomial regression models reveal no support for the hypothesis that childhood antisocial behavior is the result of an interaction between neuropsychological deficits and structural adversity. Rather, the findings suggest that while both' individual differences and structural adversity predict childhood antisocial behavior, these factors operate in an additive, rather than interactive fashion. The analyses focusing on the development of antisocial behavior from childhood to adolescence suggest that both stability and change are evident, and that early antisocial behavior is an insufficient cause of delinquency. Analysis of sub-groups constructed based on their level of antisocial behavior over time revealed some differences (including verbal intelligence and poverty status) between individuals with a history of childhood antisocial behavior (life-course persistent) and those who began offending in adolescent (adolescent limited), but these differences are overshadowed by similarities between the groups. The theoretical and policy implications of this research are discussed.