@article{ref1,
title="Age and its relation to crime in Taiwan and the United States: invariant, or does cultural context matter?",
journal="Criminology",
year="2017",
author="Steffensmeier, Darrell and Zhong, Hua and Lu, Yunmei",
volume="55",
number="2",
pages="377-404",
abstract="Current empirical and theoretical understanding of the relation between age and crime is based almost entirely on data from the United States and a few prototypical Western societies for which age-specific crime information across offense types is available. By using Western databases, Hirschi and Gottfredson (1983) projected that the age distribution of crime is always and everywhere robustly right-skewed (i.e., sharp adolescent peak)--a thesis that is both contested and widely accepted in criminology and social science writings. In the study described here, we tested this age-crime invariance thesis by comparing age-crime patterns in Taiwan (a non-Western Chinese society) with those in the United States. In light of Taiwan's collectivist culture versus the U.S. individualist gestalt, we anticipated more divergence than homogeneity in their age-crime schedules. Our findings show robust divergence in Taiwan's age-crime patterns compared with U.S. patterns and the reverted J-shaped norm projected by Hirschi and Gottfredson. Implications for research and theory on the age-crime relation and for studying human development or life-course topics more broadly are discussed.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0011-1384",
doi="10.1111/1745-9125.12139",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12139"
}