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

Antisocial Activities

Description

Specific Information: Self-reported antisocial activities

The antisocial activities calendar reflects a monthly plotting of self-reported offending activities that are endorsed during the administration of the Self Reported Offending measure (Huizinga, Esbensen, & Weihar, 1991; see the "measures" section of the codebook for a more thorough description of this measure and the specific items). If the subject indicates he/she has engaged in any one of the 24 activities elicited, he/she is then asked to indicate the month(s) of the recall period during which he/she engaged in the activity. A single activity can appear in multiple months if there were multiple occasions on which he/she engaged in the activity. This data can be used in conjunction with the recall level summary variables that are available under the "measures/SRO" section.

Additional sections related to this calendar

Of note, the data in this calendar section is 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"). In addition, a description of the SRO measure and the specific items can be found under the "Codebook - Measures" tab, under "Self-Reported offending".

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 "Codebook - 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 antisocial activities 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).

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 nine 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).
• The income offending and aggressive offending monthly variety scores overlap on two items. Specifically, they both include "Ever took by force with a weapon" and "Ever took by force without a weapon". This can cause a problem because it will artifactually increase the correlation between these two indicators. You will be less likely to get unique predictors and less likely to get discriminant variability when these two indicators are used in the same model.
• Only 22 items are considered in all calculations, even when the subject answered all 24 items in the SRO measure. Two items were added to the questionnaire later ("enter car to steal" and "went joyriding") and therefore are excluded from the calculation of summary scores because not all subjects were asked all 24 items in all recall periods.
• Beginning with interview version 01.19, all SRO items were skipped if the interview was conducted in a federal prison.

Items available regarding self-reported antisocial activities

Items at the recall level

The following summary scores characterizing the proportion of the recall period the subject engaged in antisocial activities are available:

• Proportion of months in the recall period criminally active; a proportion score in which the numerator is the number of months in which ANY of the 22 acts were endorsed, and the denominator is the number of months covered in the recall period. For example, for a six month recall period, if the subject endorsed destroying property and selling drugs during month 1 and 3 respectively, and no crime was committed in any other month of the recall period, they would have a value of .33 (2/6) for this variable.
• Proportion of months in the recall period with each SRO activity endorsed. These are proportion scores for each of the 24 different antisocial activities tapped by the SRO, where the numerator is the number of months in which the crime was endorsed, and the denominator is the number of months covered in the recall period. For example, if an individual reported selling drugs in three of six months during the recall period, they would have a value of .5 (3/6) for "Selling drugs"; if they reported an armed robbery in only one month, they would have a value of .17 (1/6) for "Armed robbery".

Items at the monthly level and in the linear format

• Specific activity engaged in during each month. For each of the 24 SRO items endorsed at the recall level, the specific month(s) in the recall period in which the subject committed each act is plotted.

The following summary scores which characterize involvement in antisocial activity at the monthly level are available (these summary scores are parallel to those available at the recall level in the SRO measure).

• Total variety proportion - by month; a proportion score in which the numerator is the number of SRO acts committed during the month, and the denominator is the number of SRO questions answered in that month (i.e., not system missing, Don't Know, or Refused).
• Aggressive variety proportion - by month; a proportion score in which the numerator is the number of aggressive acts which were committed in the month, and the denominator is the number of aggressive offense items which are not missing for that month. Eleven SRO items are coded as "aggressive" and are considered here.
• Income variety proportion - by month; a proportion score in which the numerator is the number of income offenses committed in the month, and the denominator is the number of income offense items which are not missing for that month. Ten SRO items are coded as "income" and are considered here.

For an overview and a detailed list of the questions included with this calendar please select the link(s). 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
• Elliot, D. S. ( 1990 ). National Youth Survey . Institute of Behavioral Science. University of Colorado.
• Delbert S. Elliott, David Huizinga, and Scott Menard (1989) Multiple Problem Youth: Delinquency, Substance Use, and Mental Health Problems(New York: Springer-Verlag).
• Huizinga, D., Esbensen, F., & Weihar, A. (1991). Are there multiple paths to delinquency? Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 82, 83-118.

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