Situational and social explanations of offending behaviour
The Situational Action Theory (SAT) is a general action theory of crime that explains the decision to commit a crime as the result of interaction between an individual’s criminal propensities and the environment in which the decision to commit a crime is made. As a test of several key situational and socio-developmental propositions of the SAT, multiple regression analyses (OLS) were performed on a sample of 4758 Belgian adolescents as part of the International Study of Research on Delinquency (ISRD-3). The results show that criminal propensity and specific criminogenic exposure contribute both individually and interactively to offending, that morality has a greater effect on criminal propensity than self-control, and that individual differences in criminal propensity are significantly explained by the cumulative effect of weak relationships with parents and at school and the level of exposure to crime in school or neighborhood (socio-ecological exposure). Our findings confirm the major hypotheses of the SAT using a partly francophone European sample and allow us to discuss some avenues for prevention as well as methodological issues for future research.