Reciprocal Effects of Family Disruption and Crime: A Panel Study of Canadian Municipalities

Abstract

Abstract: Using data of Canadian municipalities in 1996 and 2001, this study examined the reciprocal relationships between divorce, single-parenthood, and crime in both time-lag and simultaneous models. In the time-lag model, the reciprocal effects between percent single-parent families and crime were found to be positive and strong, whereas divorce and crime had negative and weaker reciprocal effects. In the simultaneous model, the reciprocal relationship between crime and single-parenthood remained strong, whereas crime had a unidirectional negative effect on divorce. Altogether, these results have revealed three important findings: the relationship between divorce and crime is negative; divorce and single-parenthood have different and opposite relationships with crime; and crime is an important causal factor of these family variables. Therefore, it is important to differentiate the relationships of divorce and single-parenthood with crime. More importantly, the traditional perspective of crime as just an outcome of family disruption may be inadequate, and one should take into consideration the reciprocal effects.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.