Dirk Enzmann

This study investigates whether unstructured spare time is a significant correlate of self-reported offending among adolescents in multiple countries. Drawing on survey data from 58,425 13-to-17-year-olds in 21 countries in Europe, North America, and South America, we examine whether time spent in unstructured out-of-home and at-home activities, as well as structured time at home, is associated with offending prevalence and incidence. Using multivariate models that control for key criminological predictors, we find that unstructured out-of-home spare time is a robust and consistent correlate of self-reported offending. Its estimated association is larger than that of most classical predictors. While structured spare time at home is associated with lower levels of offending, unstructured spare time, particularly out-of-home, is strongly linked to both prevalence and incidence of crime involvement. Country-specific analyses reveal that this pattern holds across most national samples. Simulation analyses suggest that modest reductions in unstructured out-of-home spare time may be associated with lower levels of adolescent offending. These findings indicate that unstructured time environments constitute a cross-culturally robust correlate of adolescent offending, with potential relevance across dispositional and opportunity-based explanations, and with implications for how prevention frameworks conceptualize adolescents’ everyday environments.

Crime motivated by hate toward social groups and identities is a major social problem. Due to the rise of interethnic, ideological, and religious tensions, the criminal policy relevance of this crime has increased. One compelling question for hate crime researchers has been whether hate crime is different from general crime. In this study, we draw on the most recent available comparative European dataset, the third sweep of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study ( N = 34,871), to explore the extent and correlates of hate crime offending across sampled urban youth populations from 17 European countries. We find that 2.5% of 12–16-year-olds reported involvement in a hate crime. Country rates range from 0.7% to 6.5%, with the lowest figures observed in Western Europe and the highest figures observed in Southeast Europe. The individual-level risk factors of hate crimes tend to be the same as in other offending, thus supporting general rather than specific causation. However, some evidence suggests that some risk factors were particularly strongly associated with committing hate-motivated crimes: disorder in neighborhood, risky routines, discriminatory attitudes, low self-control and propensity to feel shame, lifetime delinquency, male gender, and hate crime victimization. Country-level differences in the studied individual-level risk factors only partly explained the differences between urban youth populations in the prevalence of hate crime, thus indicating national-level contextual effects that should be further explored in future research. As our data are based on city-level samples rather than full national populations, these findings should be interpreted as reflecting differences between urban areas in different countries rather than nationwide patterns.

Burnout is a common metaphor for a state of extreme psychophysical exhaustion, usually work-related. This book provides an overview of the burnout syndrome from its earliest recorded occurrences to current empirical studies. It reviews perceptions that burnout is particularly prevalent among certain professional groups - police officers, social workers, teachers, financial traders - and introduces individual inter- personal, workload, occupational, organizational, social and cultural factors. Burnout deals with occurrence, measurement, assessment as well as intervention and treatment programmes. This textbook should prove useful to occupational and organizational health and safety researchers and practitioners around the world. It should also be a valuable resource for human resources professional and related management professionals.