Journal of developmental and life-course criminology, 2016, Volume: 2, Issue:2
Desistance scholars primarily focus on changing social roles, cognitive transformations, and shifting identities to understand the cessation of serious crime and illicit drug use in adulthood. In the current study, we move the spotlight away from adulthood and toward adolescence, the developmental stage when the prevalence of offending and substance use peak and desistance from most of these behaviors begins. Our primary hypothesis is that changes in perceived psychic rewards surrounding initial forays into marijuana use strongly predict adolescents' decisions to cease or persist that behavior. In addition, based on social learning expectations, we hypothesize that peer perceptions and behaviors provide mechanisms for perceptual change.. We find that changes in marijuana's perceived psychic rewards surrounding initiation differentiated experimenters from persisters. Experimenters had significantly lower updated perceptions of marijuana as a fun behavior compared to persisters and these perceptions dropped after the initiation wave. In contrast, persisters updated their perceptions in upward directions and maintained more positive perceptions over time. Inconsistent with social learning expectations, initiators' updated perceptions of marijuana as a fun activity were not explained by peer-reported behaviors or attitudes. Topics: Adolescent; Adult; Age Factors; Aged; Amino Acid Substitution; Anemia, Aplastic; Athletes; Athletic Performance; Bone Marrow Transplantation; Carcinoma, Non-Small-Cell Lung; Catalytic Domain; Cell Count; Child; Child, Preschool; Escherichia coli; Female; Gene Expression; Graft Survival; Graft vs Host Disease; Histocompatibility Testing; Humans; Hydrogen Bonding; Immunosuppression Therapy; Inosine Monophosphate; Integrin alphaVbeta3; Kinetics; Knee Joint; Lung Neoplasms; Lymphatic Metastasis; Male; Mediastinal Neoplasms; Middle Aged; Molecular Dynamics Simulation; Muscle, Skeletal; Mutation; Organotechnetium Compounds; Pentosyltransferases; Peptides, Cyclic; Phenylalanine; Plasmodium falciparum; Protein Interaction Domains and Motifs; Protein Structure, Secondary; Protozoan Proteins; Radiopharmaceuticals; Recombinant Proteins; Running; Sensitivity and Specificity; Serine; Siblings; Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography Computed Tomography; Soccer; Structure-Activity Relationship; Substrate Specificity; Thermodynamics; Threonine; Time Factors; Torque; Treatment Outcome; Tryptophan; Tyrosine; Young Adult | 2016 |