RT Article
T1 Parental Divorce and Adolescent Offending: A Comparison Between Children of Discordant Siblings
JF International journal of offender therapy and comparative criminology
VO 69
IS 8
SP 980
OP 994
A1 van de Weijer, S.G.A.
A2 Kroese, J.
LA English
YR 2025
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1924905728
AB Various studies have found that parental divorce is associated with offspring offending during adolescence. Less is known, however, about the mechanisms underlying this association, and it may be possible that this association is spurious rather than causal. In this study, register data on 1,883,794 individuals, who were born in the Netherlands between 1991 and 2001, and their parents were used to examine to what extent parental divorce is associated with offspring adolescent offending. Moreover, a genetically-informed research design, in which children of discordant siblings (N = 59,102) were compared, was applied to examine whether unmeasured familial confounders (i.e., genetic and shared environment confounders) account for this association. Our findings suggest a positive relationship between parental divorce and adolescent offending, yet we find a weaker relationship when comparing offspring of discordant siblings. This suggests that previous studies may have overestimated the strength of the association, as they do not control for unmeasured familial confounders.
K1 parental separation
K1 genetically informed study
K1 Intergenerational
K1 Family
K1 parental divorce
K1 Delinquency
K1 Crime
DO 10.1177/0306624X231188235