Ph.D. Candidate Timothy Kang, in collaboration with Professor Julian Tanner and Professor Scot Wortley published a study, entitled, "Same Routines, Different Effects: Gender, Leisure, and Young Offending" in Justice Quarterly. The article aims to clarify the relationship between gender, routine activities, and deviance in order to assess routine activity theory's ability to explain the apparent gender gap in criminal offending. Timothy Kang is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Toronto. His research interests lie primarily within socio-legal studies, as well as qualitative/quantitative analysis and social statistics. Professor Julian Tanner teaches sociology at the University of Toronto's Scarborough Campus, and his research explores youth gangs, youth culture, and criminality in Toronto. Professor Scot Wortley is an associate professor of criminology and is currently involved in a number of projects, such as a study of street gangs in southern Ontario, as well as an analysis of the police use of force in Ontario.
We have posted the citation and the abstract below. The full article is available here.
Timothy Kang, Julian Tanner & Scot Wortley (2018) Same Routines, Different Effects: Gender, Leisure, and Young Offending, Justice Quarterly, 35:6, 1030-1072,
The current study seeks to extend routine activity theory by examining how gender conditions the relationship between leisure activities and adolescent delinquency. Using OLS regression with a sample of high school students from Toronto (n = 2,209), we find that (1) engaging in more unstructured and unsupervised activities with peers is associated with delinquency more strongly for boys than for girls, but is associated with substance use equally across gender; (2) this pattern is likely due to gender differences in the locations or contexts of leisure activities; and (3) prosocial leisure activities are associated with less delinquency only for boys. In general, routine activity theory appears apt at explaining the substance use of boys and girls, but is less capable of explaining the property and violent offending of girls. We discuss our findings and their implications for the growing body of research extending routine activity theory to explain gender differences in delinquency.