Delinquency and Substance Use in Europe: Understanding Risk and Protective Factors

166 Pages·2021·3.43 MB·English

by  David P. Farrington, Harrie Jonkman, Frederick Groeger-Roth

David P. Farrington
Harrie Jonkman
Frederick Groeger-Roth  Editors
Delinquency
and Substance
Use in Europe
Understanding Risk and Protective
Factors
Delinquency and Substance Use in Europe
David P. Farrington • Harrie Jonkman
Frederick Groeger-Roth
Editors
Delinquency and Substance
Use in Europe
Understanding Risk and Protective Factors
Editors
David P. Farrington Harrie Jonkman
Institute of Criminology Verwey-Jonker Institute
University of Cambridge Utrecht, The Netherlands
Cambridge, UK
Frederick Groeger-Roth
Department of Justice of Lower Saxony
Crime Prevention Council of Lower Saxony
Hannover, Germany
ISBN 978-3-030-58441-2 ISBN 978-3-030-58442-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58442-9
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Foreword
Communities That Care (CTC) is a system for empowering communities to pro-
mote healthy development and prevent problem behaviors in children and adoles-
cents. The CTC system has been proven in a community-randomized trial and a
statewide quasi-experimental trial to produce sustained population-level reductions
in the initiation of delinquent and violent behaviors and drug misuse in communities
(Chilenski, Frank, Summers, & Lew, 2019; Hawkins et al., 2012; Oesterle et al.,
2018). A book by Fagan and colleagues (2019) describes CTC’s development, test-
ing, and dissemination. The Center for Communities That Care at the Social
Development Research Group, School of Social Work, University of Washington,
directed by Dr. Kevin Haggerty, disseminates the CTC intervention (www.commu-
nitiesthatcare.net).
Key to the effectiveness of Communities That Care is the Communities That
Care Youth Survey (CTC-YS), a tool for assessing levels of antisocial behavior and
drug use and the risk factors that predict and protective factors thought to prevent
these behaviors among young people in a community. Typically administered anon-
ymously in a community’s schools serving 12- to 18-year-old students, the CTC-YS
enables the community’s young people to honestly report their own exposures,
experiences, and behaviors without fear. The survey’s scales provide a baseline
assessment of risk, protection, and behavioral problems that communities use to
guide youth development and problem behavior prevention efforts and to measure
progress over time through repeated administrations of the CTC-YS every two years.
The development and psychometric testing of the CTC-YS were led by
Dr. Michael W. Arthur, a beloved member of the Social Development Research
Group at the University of Washington who passed away this last year. His leader-
ship in its development, with input from states and communities, resulted in a reli-
able and valid survey instrument whose results are easily scored, understood, and
used by communities (Arthur et al., 2007; Arthur, Hawkins, Pollard, Catalano, &
Baglioni, 2002; Briney, Brown, Hawkins, & Arthur, 2012; Glaser, Van Horn, Arthur,
Hawkins, & Catalano, 2005). From the outset, Michael, Richard F. Catalano, and I
agreed that the CTC-YS should be publicly available to communities without cost
so that any community seeking an epidemiologically reliable and valid assessment
v
vi Foreword
of levels of risk exposure, protection, and problem behaviors of its young people
could freely use the CTC-YS to guide its prevention work.
The chapters in this exciting new book, reporting results from the Communities
That Care Youth Survey from five European countries, indicate the wisdom of plac-
ing the CTC-YS in the public domain. These European investigators have used the
CTC-YS to answer both shared and unique questions about risk exposure, protec-
tive factors, and problem behaviors among their own young people. The common
foundations of the five studies in different European countries in this book are well
described by the editors, Harrie Jonkman, David Farrington, and Frederick Groeger-
Roth, in Chap. 1. In Chap. 8, the editors provide an excellent summary of conclu-
sions across studies and the way forward for empirically based prevention of
adolescent delinquency and drug use in Europe and beyond.
Chapter 2 by David Farrington, David Utting, and Nick Axford provides an
excellent history of the efforts to bring the CTC prevention system to Great Britain
and describes previous efforts to conduct national surveys of delinquency and drug
use in Great Britain. Elegant analyses of the nationally representative CTC-YS data
in Tables 2.6 and 2.7 provide independent validation from Great Britain of the rela-
tionships between risk and protective factors and adolescent behavior outcomes
found in the USA and other samples (Baheiraei et al., 2016; Hemphill et al., 2011).
I appreciate the discussion in this chapter seeking to distinguish causal from co-
occurring risk factors from a preventive perspective. The data from Great Britain
underscore the continuing importance of family protective factors in adolescent
development.
Chapter 3 by Harrie Jonkman and Clemens Hosman, reporting on CTC in the
Netherlands, used an internet rather than school survey and different analysis meth-
ods, dichotomizing at the median on each factor and counting those above the
median as having that risk or protective factor. They also reported the Population
Attributable Fraction (PAF) for each risk and protective factor. Tables 3.5 and 3.6
are worth studying regarding odds ratios and PAF for delinquency and violent
behavior for measured CTC-YS risk and protective factors included in the
Netherlands data set. The data in this chapter again point to the importance of pro-
tective factors of family opportunities, rewards, and bonding to family, in prevent-
ing delinquent and violent behavior.
Chapter 4 by Frederick Groeger-Roth and Burkhard Hasenpusch provides an
excellent example of planning, full implementation, and assessment of the CTC
process in three pilot sites and then five sites in Lower Saxony, Germany, using all
the CTC data collection instruments including the CTC-YS. The survey was admin-
istered online in schools to whole classrooms of students simultaneously. Both this
chapter and Chap. 3 provide figures showing the relationship of exposure to increas-
ing numbers of risk factors to increased prevalence of delinquent behavior and vio-
lence and the relationship of increased protection with less delinquency and
violence. Continued work on the measurement of risk and protective factors and
more recent use of empirically derived cutoff scores to identify those at risk on each
specific factor are interesting German developments described in the chapter.
Foreword vii
Note that researchers in the Netherlands and Germany elected to eliminate
CTC-YS scales with Cronbach’s Alpha reliability less than 0.60. This resulted in
different scales being eliminated from the data sets in these two countries, limiting
the ability to compare the strength of relationships between risk and protective fac-
tors and behavior outcomes across countries. In such cases, it might be worth
exploratory analyses using the less reliable scales to see how similar or different
results are across studies even in the face of potential reliability problems which
should lessen the likelihood of finding relationships.
Chapter 5 by Josipa Basic, Miranda Novak, and Josipa Mihic describes the use
of the CTC-YS in two cities in Croatia with a sample of 1424 secondary school and
high school students. Table 5.5 is an interesting display of unique and common
relationships of risk and protective factors as measured in the Croatian-developed
CTC-YS with a range of youth outcomes including gambling, suicidal ideation, and
depressive symptoms in addition to violence, drug use, and alcohol use. Like each
of the preceding chapters, this chapter provides a clear description of the implica-
tions of the findings for policy.
Chapter 6, by Andreas Kapardis, George Spanoudis, Constandina Kapardis, and
Maria Konstantinou, provides a good example of adherence to the CTC system in
seeking to involve local key leaders in CTC decisions regarding priority risks to be
addressed and interventions to be used in Cyprus. The results of analyses show the
strength of risk factors in predicting youth outcomes in a structural equation model.
Chapter 7 provides interesting comparisons of the prevalence of delinquency
and drug use behaviors across the samples from different countries. Note that even
in the face of quite different prevalences of delinquent behavior and drug use
across different samples and use of different analysis methods, many risk and pro-
tective factors are consistent in direction and strength of relationship with out-
comes across samples from different countries. While risk factors are consistently
more strongly related to delinquency and drug use outcomes than protective fac-
tors in these data sets, family protective factors of opportunities, rewards, and
bonding during adolescence appear to have consistent protective effects across
several studies and countries.
I am very happy to see the presentation of the theoretical model underlying the
CTC system and CTC Youth Survey, the social development model (Cambron,
Catalano, & Hawkins, 2019; Catalano & Hawkins, 1996; Hawkins & Weis, 1985),
described in Chap. 8.
Different types of organizations undertook implementation and use of the
CTC-YS in the different studies reported here, including universities, government
agencies, and foundations. Yet all these studies were driven by a clear vision of the
importance of measuring empirically derived risk and protective factors in addition
to epidemiologically valid data on adolescent delinquency, violence, and substance
use. All these chapters describe how valid and reliable measurement of risk and
protection exposure in youth populations can be used to guide policies and preven-
tive interventions in cities, counties, states, and nations, often with very specific
recommendations based on the data presented.
viii Foreword
This book demonstrates the power of international collaboration in a time when
it appears in short supply in the face of the pandemic spread of the COVID 19 virus.
These authors show the utility of designing, conducting, and reporting studies that
include epidemiologically valid measures of risk and protection and adolescent
problem behaviors based on a shared theoretical foundation and using a shared mea-
surement tool, the CTC-YS. It is heartening to see how these brilliant scientists,
researchers, policy-makers, community developers, and practitioners in five differ-
ent countries have used the CTC-YS to improve understanding of youth behaviors
and to create the empirical foundation for promoting prosocial behaviors and pre-
venting adolescent problem behaviors. Michael Arthur would be very happy.
J. David Hawkins
Social Development Research Group
School of Social Work,
University of Washington
Seattle, WA, USA
References
Arthur, M. W., Briney, J. S., Hawkins, J. D., Abbott, R. D., Brooke-Weiss, B. L., & Catalano, R. F.
(2007). Measuring risk and protection in communities using the Communities That Care Youth
Survey. Evaluation and Program Planning, 30, 197-211.
Arthur, M. W., Hawkins, J. D., Pollard, J. A., Catalano, R. F., & Baglioni, A. J., Jr. (2002). Measuring
risk and protective factors for substance use, delinquency, and other adolescent problem behav-
iors: The Communities That Care Youth Survey. Evaluation Review, 26, 575-601.
Baheiraei, A., Soltani, F., Ebadi, A., Cheraghi, M. A., Foroushani, A. R., & Catalano, R. F. (2016).
Psychometric properties of the Iranian version of ‘Communities That Care Youth Survey’.
Health Promotion International, 31, 59-72.
Briney, J. S., Brown, E. C., Hawkins, J. D., & Arthur, M. W. (2012). Predictive validity of estab-
lished cut points for risk and protective factor scales from the Communities That Care Youth
Survey. Journal of Primary Prevention, 33, 249-258.
Cambron, C., Catalano, R. F., & Hawkins, J. D. (2019). The social development model. In D. P.
Farrington, L. Kazemian, & A. R. Piquero (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of developmental and
life-course criminology (pp. 224-247). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Catalano, R. F., & Hawkins, J. D. (1996). The social development model: A theory of antisocial
behavior. In J. D. Hawkins (Ed.), Delinquency and crime: Current theories (pp. 149-197). New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Chilenski, S. M., Frank, J., Summers, N., & Lew, D. (2019). Public health benefits 16 years after
a statewide policy change: Communities That Care in Pennsylvania. Prevention Science, 20,
947-958.
Fagan, A. A., Hawkins, J. D., Catalano, R. F., & Farrington, D.P. (2019). Communities That Care:
Building community engagement and capacity to prevent youth behavior problems. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Glaser, R. R., Van Horn, M. L., Arthur, M. W., Hawkins, J. D., & Catalano, R. F. (2005).
Measurement properties of the Communities That Care® Youth Survey across demographic
groups. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 21, 73-102.
Foreword ix
Hawkins, J. D., Oesterle, S., Brown, E. C., Monahan, K. C., Abbott, R. D., Arthur, M. W., &
Catalano, R. F. (2012). Sustained decreases in risk exposure and youth problem behaviors after
installation of the Communities That Care prevention system in a randomized trial. Archives of
Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 166, 141-148.
Hawkins, J. D., & Weis, J. G. (1985). The social development model: An integrated approach to
delinquency prevention. Journal of Primary Prevention, 6, 73-97.
Hemphill, S. A., Heerde, J. A., Herrenkohl, T. I., Patton, G. C., Toumbourou, J. W., & Catalano, R.
F. (2011). Risk and protective factors for adolescent substance use in Washington State, United
States and Victoria, Australia: A longitudinal study. Journal of Adolescent Health, 49, 312-320.
Oesterle, S., Kuklinski, M. R., Hawkins, J. D., Skinner, M. L., Guttmannova, K., & Rhew, I. C.
(2018). Long-term effects of the Communities That Care trial on substance use, antisocial
behavior, and violence through age 21 years. American Journal of Public Health, 108, 659-665.
Preface
The main aim of this book is to present information about delinquency and drug use
and risk and protective factors that are related to these social problems, in five
European countries: Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Croatia, and Cyprus.
This information was obtained by administering the same survey (the Communities
That Care Youth Survey or CTC-YS) to samples of young people in all the different
countries. This survey made it possible to compare these social problems, and influ-
ences on them, in these five countries.
Communities That Care (CTC) is a community change process that targets risk
and protective factors with preventive interventions that have been proved to be
effective. The CTC-YS was developed as a tool to provide community-based part-
nerships with reliable information about the prevalence of youth behavior problems,
as well as the prevalence of underlying risk and protective factors. This assessment
enables communities to select top-priority risk and protective factors for targeting,
based on the profile of the particular community, and to match the most elevated risk
factors and/or most depressed protective factors with preventive strategies.
Currently, little is known about the generalizability of this risk and protection
approach in Europe. This book aims to fill this gap in knowledge. The work that led
to this book was made possible through a grant by the “Prevention of and Fight
against Crime Program” of the European Commission—Directorate-General Home
Affairs for the project “Communities That Care (CTC) European Network: Making
CTC work at the European level.”
Partners in this project were:
– Crime Prevention Council of Lower Saxony (Germany)
– Dartington Social Research Unit (United Kingdom)
– Verwey-Jonker Institute (The Netherlands)
– Seinpost Adviesbureau (The Netherlands)
– University of Applied Sciences Leiden (The Netherlands)
– Institute for the Prevention of Addictions and Drug Abuse (Austria)
– City of Malmö (Sweden)
– University of Cyprus (Cyprus)
– University of Zagreb (Croatia)
xi