Mens & Maatschappij - Volume 84, Issue 2, 2009

Static versus dynamic theories as explanations for intergenerational transmission of crime .

Parental criminal behaviour exerts a substantial impact on offspring criminal behaviour. Unfortunately however, the explanation for the intergenerational transmission of crime remains unclear. To compare and contrast two possible explanations, we address the question of whether the timing of a father’s criminal acts predicts the likelihood that his children commit crime. According to static theories, the total number of criminal acts rather than the exact timing influences the likelihood of offspring criminal behaviour. According to dynamic theories, timing is crucial and children are more likely to engage in criminal behaviour after fathers have committed criminal acts. Results show that the total number of delinquent acts is an important predictor, and also that the exact timing plays an important role. In the year the father has been convicted, the likelihood that the child commits crime increases substantially and decays in the following years at a slower rate the more crimes the father has committed. Our results show that the rigorous assumptions of static theories require nuancing.

The impact of the mother tongue on the acquisition of Dutch as a destination language: The case of 13 West-European first languages .

This study reports on the impact of 13 West-European first languages spoken in 18 different language regions on the acquisition of Dutch. Results based on data from approximately 5,500 first-generation migrants, showed that the mother tongue had a considerable impact on the scores for two language skills as measured by the State Exam Dutch as a Second Language, namely oral and written proficiency in Dutch. Multilevel analyses revealed that the effect of the mother tongue could adequately be modeled by means of the cognate linguistic distance measure, adopted from McMahon and McMahon (2005). The explanatory power of the genetic linguistic distance measure (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994) was rather poor. In addition, migrant characteristics (age of arrival, length of residence, number of hours of Dutch lessons, education, and gender) and the contextual characteristic quality of schooling in the country of origin contributed to the explanation of the variation in Dutch speaking and writing skills.

The intergenerational reproduction of cultural capital in its embodied, institutionalized, and objectified states .

According to Bourdieu, cultural capital manifests itself in three states: the institutionalized state, the embodied state, and the objectified state. Empirical research using the notion of cultural capital has never operationalized the concept fully, i.e., using indicators of all three states. We provide such a threefold measurement of cultural capital for both respondents and their parents, which allows us to take a very detailed look at the process of the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital. We found that respondents’ schooling levels (institutionalized state) are affected by parental education and, to a lesser extent, parental cultural behaviour, and both effects are smaller among younger generations. Cultural participation (embodied state) does not become less dependent on cultural family background over time; it is affected by all three manifestations of parental cultural capital, although the embodied state is by far the most important. Cultural possessions (objectified state) are mostly affected by parental cultural goods and this association continues to be of importance even though the effects of the other states of parental cultural capital on respondents’ cultural possessions are declining. Our results thus reveal that the three states of cultural capital differ in the constellation of their causes and consequences plus the changes therein, which demonstrates that less elaborate operationalizations of cultural capital do not provide proxies that represent the entire concept.

Recorded crime as an indicator of the integration of individuals of non-Western origin.

In this article, we seek to find out to what extent the various ethnic groups residing in the Netherlands are (over)represented as suspects in the recorded crime statistics. This research reveals that even after correcting for a number of socioeconomic background variables, the probability of being suspected of an offence is still considerably greater for non-Western ethnic minority groups than for the autochthonous Dutch population. Particularly notable in the figures is the large overrepresentation of second-generation Moroccans and first-generation Antilleans. The data we used in this study are recorded crime statistics, which are based on the entire population and can be analysed at the individual level. These data certainly do not provide a complete description of crime in the Netherlands; a substantial ‘dark number’ remains. However, there are no hard indications that this dark number differs between the various ethnic groups residing in the Netherlands.