Methodology and design of the ISRD-2 study

Abstract

The ISRD-2 as a comparative study of youth crime and victimization has two distinguishing features: (1) the rather large number of participating countries and (2) the explicitly standardized comparative design. There is no question that an explicit comparative design has many advantages over other designs. Yet, the cross-national standardized approach presents serious challenges and problems, methodologically as well as logistically. Some of these challenges we anticipated, some of them we did not. In a sense, because of its ambitious comparative design, our study has been a work in progress from the beginning - and continues to be so even at the stage of data analysis and - interpretation. The degree to which we have -succeeded in achieving the goals of our study (i.e., to describe the cross-national variability in the prevalence and incidence of delinquency and victimization; to test for national differences in the theoretical correlates of delinquency and victimization; and to describe cross-national variability in selected dimensions of delinquency such as versatility, age of onset, co-offending) depends, to large extent, on the -particular methodological choices we have made - at the onset of the project, and along the way.