학교의 지역적 특성과 청소년비행：다수준 접근의 적용

School Effects on Juvenile Delinquency：An Application of Multilevel Approach

Causes of delinquency have been largely understood at three different levels：individual, family/school and society. This study raises questions about current research, which neglects the mid-range level of explanation such as community and school effects. This negligence stems from current theoretical orientation of criminology, which fails to incorporate the diverse levels and dimensions of crime phenomena. This study constructs an integrated multilevel model, which investi- gates the effect of two school-level characteristics and two individual-level characteristics. The basic hypothesis for this study is that the variation in delinquency is not only explained by individual characteristics but also by school characteristics and the variation is differentiated by delinquency type such as status or violent crimes. The results showed that schools with high disorder and low efficacy tend to have more delinquent students. School effects are more manifested in light offenses and individual effects are more effective in serious offenses. Also, the cross-level interaction was effective in that the effects of delinquent friends was bigger in schools with high degree of social disorder than in schools with low degree of disorder. For the policy implication, it is highly recommended to pay more attention to the so-called collective efficacy even if collective efficacy in this study is only limited to the light offenses. As Karsarda and Janowitz found out, the role of low mobility rate among residents is very important to increase the collective efficacy of a certain community. However, official statistics show that the residential mobility in Korea is a lot higher than that of world average and even with that of advanced countries. In this sense, we need to focus on the way of increasing the collective efficacy not by just focusing on the coerced control but rather by focusing on the social control.