A study of serious adolescent offenders as they transition to adulthood and out of crime

Contacts with the Justice System

Description

Specific Information: Contact with the justice system

Self-reported information regarding involvement with the justice system is captured at the monthly level in this calendar. The subject reports on five different types of contact with police and courts over the course of the recall period. Types of interactions explored include whether the subject was 1) picked up by the police but NOT charged, 2) received a summons or letter telling them to appear in court, 3) had a court appearance for a crime they were accused of, 4) were arrested and charged, and 5) whether they received assistance from the police or courts as the victim of a crime. Below is a list of specific types of information that we have for this calendar.

Of note, the data in this specific calendar are based on self-report. A monthly plotting of arrests based on official record information is available elsewhere (see the "Official Court Record Information" section under "Codebook").

• For each type of interaction endorsed: we record the specific month(s) of the recall period in which the type of interaction occurred. For the month(s) the subject reports being arrested and charged with a crime, an NCIC code and description of the most serious charge for that month is obtained.
• Several recall level summary variables are computed regarding these monthly level reports (e.g., total number of months arrested/charged; proportion of months arrested/charged; total number of months picked up, etc.).

A more detailed list of the information available in this calendar appears below.

Additional sections related to this calendar

Other sections of the Sanctions and Interventions calendar offer variables that supplement the information contained herein (see "Calendar Data/Sanctions and Interventions" for additional codebook sections). Specifically:

• Out of Community Placements. Information regarding residential services received over the recall period. Specifically, whether the youth had an overnight stay in ten different types of placements; the length of stay; characteristics of each institution and specific services received during their stay.
• Community based services. Information regarding services the subject received while in the community, including the frequency each service was received by month, focus (for d/a treatment, anger management/social skills training), and circumstances (whether the service was court-ordered, whether the youth attended alone or with family).
• Court monitoring services. Information regarding four types of court monitoring, including probation/parole, community intensive supervision, drug court programs, and court-ordered groups.
• Medication. Information regarding prescription medication the subject has taken for emotional and/or behavioral problems, as well as information regarding medication compliance.
• Official Court Record Information. Information regarding arrests and court involvement, including a monthly plotting of arrests based on official record information. This can be found under "Codebook -- Official Court Record Information".

Be sure to review the descriptions for each of these codebook sections in order to obtain a complete understanding of the information we have available regarding sanctions and interventions.

Descriptive Information: Monthly Data Characterizing the Recall Period

As a standard practice, the specific calendar information will be accompanied by four variables which describe the recall period. This information is important for the user to consider when attempting to use data characterizing the recall period (e.g., measures) in conjunction with the monthly-level calendar data. In addition, this information is useful if the user is viewing events from a developmental perspective. These variables include:

• The actual number of days in each month that is represented in the calendar data.
• The calendar month and year mapped to the recall month (e.g., if S1M04 covers February 2003, the 'number of days' value for that month will be 28, and the calendar month associated with S1M04 will be 02/2003, "RealDate").
• The subject's age at each month of the recall period, available in two forms: 1) the subject's age truncated to a whole number, and 2) the age as a continuous variable. (The subject age at the time of the interview is available in the "Demographics" codebook, available under "Measures").
• A marker indicating whether each month of the recall period is a community or institution month, where an institution month is defined as a month where the subject spent eight or more days across the following type of out of community placements: drug/alcohol facility, psychiatric hospital or unit, jail or prison, detention, YDC or ADJC, contracted residential treatment (general), and contracted residential treatment (mental health). These setting types are described in detail in the "Out of Community Placements" codebook, available under "Calendars".

In addition, each dataset includes five variables which describe basic information related to the interview. These are explained in full detail in the "Interview Information" section under "Measures". These variables include the completion status of the interview, the date of the interview, version number in which the interview was conducted, the number of months in the recall period, and the number of days in the recall period.

General Information: Use of monthly life calendar data

Data regarding the participant's self-reported contact with the justice system is captured using a monthly life-calendar approach (Belli, 1998; Caspi, Moffitt, Thornton, & Freedman, 1996), where the research participant is provided with a visual calendar that contextualizes the recall of research data by anchoring information to salient events. Specifically, individuals are first asked to recount salient events which occurred in the recall period (e.g. birthdays, deaths) and this information remains visible to the participant as an anchor point for the timing of events in each of several life calendar domains. This approach thus creates an integrated view of activities in all of the domains examined, has firm roots in the science of how people remember events and life situations (Bradburn, Rips, and Shevell, 1987; Belli, 1998), and capitalizes on these processes to generate accounts of past events. On a practical level, it provides researchers with a richer set of data points. Instead of simply getting a summary measure of life changes over an extended recall period, the monthly life-calendar places these changes at specific points in time, opening up the possibility of examining sequences of events and potential causal mechanisms within individuals (Fals-Stewart, 2003; Mulvey, et al., 2006).

General Information: Conversion of data to linear months

The monthly Pathways data, in its raw form, is not suited for some kinds of analytic approaches (e.g., trajectory analysis). Each time point interview allows for a maximum of eight or 14 months in the recall period, depending on the follow-up wave (eight months was the maximum for time points 6-36 and 14 was the maximum for time points 48-84). This means that there is a corresponding variable in the dataset reflecting events occurring in each of those months through a maximum of 14 months (the outer limit of any of the possible months covered). If however, the recall period did not include the maximum number of months (as is most often the case), there will be variables with no data. For example, subject 1 has a recall period of five months for follow-up 12 so this means he/she will have data in five monthly variables, but not in the remaining nine. Subject 2, has seven months in the recall period for follow-up 12 so he/she will have data in all but seven of the monthly variables. The recall length is set by programming code based on the current date in relationship to the date of the previous interview (see "Interview Information" under Measures for a more detailed description of how the length of the recall period is determined). However, the programming code did permit the interviewer to "reset" by hand the length of the recall period. This was done infrequently, but in some instances it created a situation where we obtained two reports of the same month. For example, follow-up 6 covered months January to June and the interviewer resets the follow-up 12 recall period to start with June (leading to two different reports for the month of June). A series of data cleaning decisions (described in the "Contacts with the Justice System Calendar Documentation") were implemented to correct these situations but we note them here because they are relevant to the conversion of the data to linear months.

The "linear months" data set-up corrects these two situations. The "linear months" data reformats the variables so that each variable is a sequential representation of life event data for each month of the research participant's life from the baseline interview forward. In this format, variables that were place-markers for months not covered in the recall period are eliminated and situations where there were two reports for the same month are corrected. Thus, "linear month 8" actually represents eight calendar months from the baseline and "linear month 16" is actually 16 months past the baseline interview.

A specific list of variables available in the linear format is provided below. Also provided is a "map" to link the linear month back to the recall period and month in which the information was originally collected. This is important to know when recall-level data is being used in conjunction with the monthly event calendar data.

Data Issues

• The follow06 through follow36 timepoints allow for a maximum of eight months in the recall period, while follow48 and later will have a maximum of 14. Note that while variables for months 9 through 14 are included in the datasets for follow06 through follow36, these are essentially place markers and in no instance will any case have data for these months until the follow48 period (see description above).
• An error in the interview programming code made it possible for the subject to either skip the calendar completely, or to exit without fully completing the calendar. Cases with this issue are noted with a missing value code of -700 (Data missing: result of a programming error).
• The variable "Did you receive police/court assistance" and the accompanying calendar is available only for interview versions 01.21 and later. Note that these questions were not directly asked in the interview. After completing the picked up, summons, arrested, and court appearance calendars, the subject was asked if they had any other type of contact with the police and/or courts in the recall period. If they have, they were asked to provide a text description of the type of contact each month. In cases where the subject described an incident where they were the victim of some crime (e.g., the subject was robbed; victim of a domestic violence incident; went to court to obtain a restraining order, etc), a 1 (Yes) value was assigned for that case. Situations that described a contact with the police secondary to a request for assistance (traffic tickets, court appearances for traffic tickets, etc) were removed from the calendar entirely.

Items available regarding contact with the justice system

For an overview and a detailed list of the questions included with this calendar please select the link(s) provided below the table. In addition to providing an overview of the "flow" of the calendar and a detailed listing of the questions, this document notes version issues (i.e. questions/variables that are only present for a sub-sample due to their later addition to the interview) and provides other information that is critical to using and interpreting the data correctly. The table below gives you an overview of issues related to each construct noted above and it also provides you with the page numbers within our detailed document that address each of these constructs. Please be sure to consider this information carefully before moving forward with your analysis.

Click here to download a detailed document in PDF format.

References

• Caspi, A., Moffitt, T., Thornton, A., Friedman, D., Amell, J., Harrington, H., et al. (1996). The Life History Calendar: A research and clinical assessment method for collecting retrospective event-history data. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., US, 6(2), 101-114.
• Belli, R.F. (1998). The structure of autobiographical memory and the event history calendar: Potential improvements in the quality of retrospective reports in surveys. Memory, 6(4), 383-406

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