Juvenile Delinquency in a Suburban Municipality, 1979

In March 1979, a survey of juvenile delinquency was carried out in Gladsaxe. 748, or 83 per cent, of all pupils attending the 8th form of the schools in Gladsaxe took part in the survey and completed an anonymous questionnaire concerning crimes committed. # The project aims at testing a status model which, when used for two earlier major Danish studies and a number of studies carried out in other countries, was found to be empirically untenable. # Compared with earlier studies, the empirical material for this survey contains more accurate information about the quantity and seriousness of the offences, and it is assumed that the lack of accuracy in earlier studies is one of the reasons why the status model has not been verified in these studies. Furthermore, the status model has been made more complex for this project as two intermediate variables have been added, i.e. degree of success in school and long-term/short-term life style. # The clarification of whether socio-economic conditions can help explain crime is useful in connection with assessments of the importance of the many new theories of the selection mechanisms of the judicial system. # A large number of the questions in the questionnaire was used later in the following surveys: #DDA-1651: Juvenile Delinquency in Gladsaxe and Northern Jutland, #1989, and #DDA-1652: Juvenile Delinquency in Allerød, 1990