TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2017//
TI  - Age and its relation to crime in Taiwan and the United States: invariant, or does cultural context matter?
JO  - Criminology
A1  - Steffensmeier, Darrell
A1  - Zhong, Hua
A1  - Lu, Yunmei
SP  - 377
EP  - 404
VL  - 55
IS  - 2
N2  - 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>
LA  - en
SN  - 0011-1384
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12139
ID  - ref1
ER  -