Title:	Minority Youth and Social Integration
Authors:	Sebastian Roché Dirk Enzmann Sebastian Roché Mike Hough
Keywords:	Minority Youth
Issue Date:	2018
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	This book aims at studying cohesion in a comparative manner. Its empirical foundation is an international research project, Understanding and Preventing Youth Crime (UPYC), focusing on France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA. UPYC is nested within a larger project, the International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD), a large-scale international survey of schoolchildren in around 35 countries (Enzmann et al., 2018). There are still very few comparative surveys that can address issues of social cohesion, key ones being the World Values Survey and the European Social Survey. Most of them are focussed on the adult population. Conversely, comparative surveys of adolescents tend to be school-based and address educational issues. Perhaps the best known is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a triennial international survey which aims to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students; and few have addressed questions of social cohesion, social disorder or crime. In the domain of juvenile criminology, publications tend to be international in the sense of being compilations of separate country-level studies, rather than genuine comparative work (but see Green et al., 2006 for a notable exception). Conversion to comparative research is a slow process, although a much needed one, given the diversity of nations and state forms in the EU and beyond. The UPYC/ISRD project provides an important empirical contribution to the existing academic discussion in several ways. Firstly, the ISRD dataset allows us to use a multi-level approach, with a city or national context at the macro level, a local or meso-context (neighbourhood or school) and individual level behaviours and attitudes. The survey covers a wide range of topics, including experience as crime victims and whether these crimes are reported to the police, involvement in crime as perpetrators, exposure to family violence and attitudes to morality. The ISRD also sheds light on social identities (in particular religious and ethnic identities) across various national contexts and finds intriguing results in the sense that it is the exception and ‘not’ the rule that group identification or group belonging has comparable effects in all countries. This ‘negative’ finding is important and highlights the need for understanding macro-contexts and how they impact individual level correlations. Comparing individuals and social groups across cities or countries is an important element for generalisation of theoretical assumptions: an average significant effect in a European sample might mask considerable variation between countries and between social groups in a given country.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/55588
ISBN:	978-3-319-89462-1
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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