DELINQUENCY CAUSATION - TYPOLOGICAL COMPARISON OF PATH MODELS

In this study, all three of the tested models worked best when directed towards the explanation of status and petty offenses. The types of behavior more important to efforts towards treatment and prediction (e.g. property and violent offenses) are less well explained by the models. This suggests that criminologists should give more attention to developing theoretical models effective in explaining the variance in these particular tyes of delinquency. Also, control models consistently explained more variance in each type of delinquency than did a model in which the control aspect was absent (e.g., the National Strategy Model). The conceptualization of control in terms of parental regulation and peer pressure implicit in both the Hirschi and Interpersonal Control Models appears to be one of the most important variables yet developed for explaining delinquency.