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Gender, Age, and Crime/Deviance: A Challenge to Self-Control Theory

North Carolina State University

David A. Ward

Washington State University

Harold G. Grasmick

University of Oklahoma

Focusing on gender and age variations and using various measures of self-control and of crime/deviance, the authors' provide additional evidence concerning the strongest implications of self-control theory—that self-control interprets the main demo-graphic facts about crime/deviance and is of approximately equal import for all sub-categories of individuals. On one hand, the results are strongly supportive of the theory, showing that some measures of self-control not only predict misbehavior but they interpret the associations between gender and age and measures of crime/deviance. On the other hand, self-control does not appear to predict misbehavior equally well among various subcategories of individuals, particularly not for age groups, even failing to predict misbehavior at all for some groupings. Moreover, sup-port for the strongest claims of the theory are not robust, varying depending on how self-control and crime/deviance are measured.

Key Words: self-control • age • gender

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