Adult Attitudes and Crime: Understanding the Association Between Latent Adult Attitudes and Offending Across Time

Abstract

Research on the transition into adulthood finds that individuals are likely to take on new adult roles which can influence a change in identity. Furthermore, literature on desistance finds that offending tends to decline as individuals transition into adulthood and that this decline can be attributed to changes in internal processes such as developing a new pro-social identity. However, scholarship has yet to conceptualize and measure the development of an adult identity as a latent construct. The current study seeks to establish a new latent time variant measurement I call Latent Adult Attitudes (LAA) and examine LAA’s association with offending. LAA uses a collection of items focused on attitudes towards adult roles to measure a latent construct of adult identity.