Youth and their artificial social environmental risk and promotive scores (Ya-taserps): An agent-based model of interactional theory of delinquency

Abstract

Risk assessments are designed to measure cumulative risk and promotive factors for delinquency and recidivism, and are used by criminal and juvenile justice systems to inform sanctions and interventions. Yet, these risk assessments tend to focus on individual risk and often fail to capture each individual’s environmental risk. This paper presents an agent-based model (ABM) which explores the interaction of individual and environmental risk on the youth. The ABM is based on an interactional theory of delinquency and moves be-yond more traditional statistical approaches used to study delinquency that tend to rely on point-in-time mea-sures, and to focus on exploring the dynamics and processes that evolve from interactions between agents (i.e., youths) and their environments. Our ABM simulates a youth’s day, where they spend time in schools, their neighborhoods, and families. The youth has proclivities for engaging in prosocial or antisocial behaviors, and their environments have likelihoods of presenting prosocial or antisocial opportunities. Results from system-atically adjusting family, school, and neighborhood risk and promotive levels suggest that environmental risk and promotive factors play a role in shaping youth outcomes. As such the model shows promise for increasing our understanding of delinquency.