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Maturation beyond Age: Interrelationships among Psychosocial, Adult Role, and Identity Maturation and their Implications for Desistance from Crime

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Abstract

The integrated maturation theory describes psychosocial, adult role, and identity maturation as interrelated domains associated with criminal desistance, but to this point these domains have not been examined simultaneously, which raises questions about the relative importance of each domain to desistance. The aims of the current study were to unravel the development of maturation by examining interrelationships across components of psychosocial, adult role, and identity domains while also clarifying which components were related to desistance. Data were used from the Pathways to Desistance Study on male (n= 1170) and female (n= 184) youth with a history of offending. Participants were an average age of 14.04 (SD= 1.14) at baseline and were followed for seven years. Network modeling examined, from between-subjects and within-individual perspectives, (a) relationships among repeated measures of psychosocial, adult role, and identity maturation components and (b) relationships between these components and offending. Based on centrality indexes from the between-subjects network, responsibility (psychosocial domain), work orientation (adult role domain), and self identity (identity domain) were most important to the development of maturation. After accounting for interrelationships among maturation components, measures of consideration of others (adult role domain) and moral disengagement (identity domain) related to both lower levels of offending and within-individual declines in offending. The findings supported the integrated maturation theory’s description of maturation as comprised of a wide range of interrelated components across different domains that are important to desistance.

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Notes

  1. The current study did not use this same approach for the maturation components because these measures were not defined by counts of behaviors and thus shorter recall periods did not impact comparisons across waves. After converting the baseline indicator of the number of times each self-reported offending behavior was perpetrated in the last year into an indicator of versatility, all models were identical except for an additional significant association in the contemporaneous network between offending and resistance to peer influence.

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Authors’ Contributions

E.M. conceived of the study, drafted the manuscript and performed all statistical analyses; P.L. and M.R. contributed to the drafting of all areas of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Funding

There is no funding associated with this manuscript. The Pathways to Desistance Study data were funded by various groups (see https://www.pathwaysstudy.pitt.edu/funders.html)

Data Sharing and Declaration

The dataset analyzed during the current study is available in the ICPSR repository (https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NAHDAP/studies/32282).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada

    Evan McCuish

  2. École de travail social et de criminologie/School of Social Work and Criminology, Université Laval, 1030 ave. des sciences-humaines, Quebec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada

    Patrick Lussier

  3. Department of Sociology, Bates College, 2 Andrews Rd, Lewiston, ME, 04240, USA

    Michael Rocque

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Correspondence to Evan McCuish.

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Conflict of Interest

E.M. and P.L. report no conflicts of interest. M.R. received compensation for a talk on maturation and crime in the Fall of 2019.

Ethical Approval

The institutional review boards at all participating universities approved the original Pathways Study.

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No identifiable information was obtained for the purposes of the current study. The Pathways to Desistance researchers obtained informed consent before collecting data on the subjects.

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McCuish, E., Lussier, P. & Rocque, M. Maturation beyond Age: Interrelationships among Psychosocial, Adult Role, and Identity Maturation and their Implications for Desistance from Crime. J Youth Adolescence 49, 479–493 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01178-w

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