Delinquency Among Turkish Adolescents: Testing Akers’ Social Structure and Social Learning Theory

Abstract

The purposes of this study are to examine how social learning processes and social structure correlate with delinquency among Turkish adolescents and to articulate to what extent Akers’s social structure and social learning (SSSL) theory explains delinquency in Turkey, which is a different cultural context from Western countries in terms of family structure, level of collectivism or individualism, religion, belief systems, and norms. This study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by providing the first study testing Akers’s theory in the Turkish context. Analyses, relying on a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework, showed that the social learning process accounted for a substantial amount of variation in explaining adolescent delinquency. We also found that social learning process somewhat mediates social structural effects on delinquency.