Gender, Peers, and Delinquency

Abstract

Unlike most other European countries, no self-report research in France has been published, so aside from available data or ethnographic and interview studies, little is known about the delinquent behavior of French youth and practically nothing about young people in the French countryside. In the research reported here, the authors administered a self-reported delinquency questionnaire to a sample of 387 lycée and collège students in the Poitou-Charentes region of central France. Employing indices used in the National Youth Survey, the authors sought to test the extent to which measures of social control and learning/differential association theories could be generalized to, and similarly help explain, the delinquency of boys and girls in rural France. Of the two theories investigated, social control measures either did not form reliable scales or were not significantly related to various offense scales, although measures of learning/differential association theory were strongly related to delinquency and about equally so for both boys and girls. The implications and limitations of the research are discussed.