Ancillary Studies

The Crossroads Study has inspired, and made possible the execution of, two ancillary studies.

  • No-Contact Sample: Initiated by Jordan Bechtold
    • The goal of this study is to investigate how youths’ first contact with the juvenile justice system affects development, as compared to the behavior of peers who engage in the same criminal behavior but are never caught.  To achieve this goal, this study investigates a sample of peers who have engaged in the same illegal behaviors as Crossroads youth, but have never had official justice system contact as a result of their crimes.  This will allow a comparison between two groups of delinquent youth: (1) those who are caught and processed by the juvenile justice system, from the Crossroads study; and (2) those who evade law enforcement and remain free from contact, from the present study. Youth in the two groups (“caught” and “not caught”) will be matched on key demographic and behavioral variables and I will investigate whether (and how) youths’ first contact with the justice system affects subsequent academic engagement (e.g., school misconduct, school bonding, school performance) and illegal behavior.
  • Parents of Youth Offenders: Initiated by Caitlin Cavanagh
    • Juvenile offending inflicts enormous costs on individual offenders, their families and their communities. Adolescent offenders do not exist in a vacuum, but in a broader context, a major portion of which includes their parents. Though there is an abundance of evidence that parental support plays a key role in a child’s success in other domains of function, the role that parents play in adolescent offenders’ probation success is largely unstudied. Offending youths’ failure to successfully complete probation may lead to deeper penetration into the justice system, while success may lead to desistence from offending. Through structured interviews with the mothers/female guardians of Crossroads youth participants, this study seeks to clarify the role parents play in the success of juvenile offenders within the juvenile justice system.