U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Delinquency Research in the Nordic Countries (From Crime and Justice in Scandinavia, P 405-477, 2011, Michael Tonry and Tapio Lappi-Seppala, eds. - See NCJ-242441)

NCJ Number
242448
Author(s)
Janne Kivivuori; Jon Gunnar Bernburg
Date Published
2011
Length
73 pages
Annotation
This paper examines Nordic delinquency research.
Abstract
Research on delinquent behavior has traditionally been a core emphasis of Nordic criminological research. Historically, Nordic cooperation in criminology began with the world's first ever internationally comparative survey of self-reported delinquency, the Nordic Draftee Research program, 1961-64. Youths of the five Nordic nations tend to manifest relatively similar prevalence levels of delinquent behavior, with a partial exception that Danish adolescents have above-average levels of substance use and property offending. During the 1990s, Danish, Finnish, and Swedish surveys revealed a consistent rise in the number of law-abiding youths, a trend explained by a coincidence of multiple social changes: diminishing cohort sizes, the rise of the surveillance society, increasingly conservative and anti-crime attitudes among youths, and changing routine activities, some of which may have resulted in crime-type displacement (from traditional theft to computer-related crime) instead of overall crime reduction. Reviewed articles in core journals reveal that focal concerns of Nordic delinquency researchers have been social problems-related research, the question of generality versus specialization of delinquency, longitudinal research in individual-level risk factors, methodological research, and research on the social causation of delinquency. (Published Abstract)