Neighborhood Normative Contexts and Offending Across Race, Ethnicity, and Immigrant Generation

Abstract

Prior literature finds differences in offending across immigrant generation and race/ethnicity, pointing to differential exposure and/or susceptibility to criminogenic risk, such as neighborhood disadvantage, across groups. I examine whether neighborhood normative contexts vary meaningfully by structural characteristics such as immigrant prevalence, and whether these “cognitive landscapes” (ecologically-structured contexts with variations in frames for behavior) differentially predict individual-level offending across the intersections of immigrant generation and race/ethnicity. I examine whether adolescents’ exposure to 1) higher tolerance of deviance in their neighborhoods and 2) greater neighborhood heterogeneity in tolerance of deviance are each correlated with their immigrant generational status and/or racial-ethnic minority status, and whether these normative contexts predict differences in the prevalence of their offending. I identify whether the relationships between normative contexts and behavior vary across the generation-race subgroups. Results suggest some variation in the influence of cultural context on behavior across demographics, informing theoretical understanding of how neighborhood contexts shape behavior for youth of diverse backgrounds and identities.