Abstract
This study, conducted at Stockholm University’s Department of Criminology, is based on a survey of a sample of youths in secondary education in three Swedish municipalities. The study was conducted in connection with the authors’ participation in the research project, “The Second International Self-report Delinquency Study (ISRD2)”. The objectives of this chapter include presenting the results from the Swedish study on the prevalence of young adults’ participation in crime and other problem behaviours, and on the levels of exposure to theft, assault, mugging and bullying. In addition, the study has the objective of throwing light on the bivariate relationships between involvement in crime and a number of variables relating to different aspects of the youths’ backgrounds, including their situation at home and in school, their leisure time activities and peer associations, their attitudes towards violence, and certain other individual factors. The paper also describes the corresponding relationships between these various factors and exposure to crime.
The next sections of this paper present a short introduction with background information about Sweden, and a description of the conduct of the survey.
Jonas Ring, Ph D, has conducted the survey with financial support from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (Grant no. 2002–0789), whose assistance he acknowledges with gratitude. Lina Andersson, currently a post-graduate doctoral student, has participated in the data collection and written parts of the report. The collection of the data was financed by the Scandinavian Research Council for Criminology. The authors thank David Shannon for assisting in translation.
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Notes
- 1.
The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions defines the term “metropolitan municipality” as a municipality with over 200,000 inhabitants, whereas a municipality in a category named “large city municipality” has a population of between 50,000 and 200,000 inhabitants, and more than 70% of urban area (the “medium sized town” in this study belongs to this category). A municipality is defined as “sparsely populated” if the population density is less than seven inhabitants per square kilometre and the population is smaller than 20,000 (Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions).
- 2.
- 3.
The 33rd and 66th percentiles were used as cut-points in cases where response frequencies were more or less normally distributed. In other cases, different cut-points were employed based on the distribution of responses and the content of the questions. The same tendencies emerge in the results irrespective of the cut-points employed for the categorization of the variables.
- 4.
The dichotomous variables “belongs to group that spend time in public places” and “illegal things accepted by group”, were only assigned the values 0 or 1 prior to the additive process.
- 5.
The alcohol variable relates to the frequency of drunkenness “ever”.
- 6.
The results relating to the group fights item should be interpreted with some caution, as the question includes amongst other things fights in the school playground, where the intensity of the violence involved may be assumed to vary dramatically.
- 7.
As regards the question of hacking, it is somewhat unclear if the behaviour being described is illegal. Some respondents wrote comments in relation to the question, where they argued that this need in fact not be illegal. In addition, different encyclopaedias provide different definitions of the Swedish use of the term “hacking” or hackers. According to some definitions, hacking is high-end computer programming, whereas others include illegal behaviours such as illegally accessing others’ computer systems in the definition of the term (Norstedts, 2003; Bra böckers lexicon, 2000; Malmström et al., 2002; Svenska Akademin, 2002).
- 8.
Split families are defined as those where the youth do not live together with both “mum” and “dad”. It could also be mentioned in this context that dichotomous variables relating to the employment situation of the parents (permanent job vs. other form of occupation) were initially included in the analyses, but since the correlations were insignificant with regard to both criminal involvement and victimization, these results were excluded from the tables for the sake of brevity.
- 9.
In this context, the term immigrant background refers to students who were either born in another country themselves, or at least one of whose parents were born in another country.
- 10.
Valid per cent.
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Ring, J., Andersson, L. (2010). Sweden. In: Junger-Tas, J., Marshall, I., Enzmann, D., Killias, M., Steketee, M., Gruszczynska, B. (eds) Juvenile Delinquency in Europe and Beyond. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-95982-5_12
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