The Source for Crime and Justice Data

Description & Citation--Study No. 9293

Bibliographic Description

Study No.:

09293

Title:

Delinquency in a Birth Cohort II: Philadelphia, 1958-1988

Principal Investigator(s):

Figlio, Robert M.

Tracy, Paul E.

Wolfgang, Marvin E.

Funding:

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

Bibliographic Citation:

Figlio, Robert M., Paul E. Tracy, and Marvin E. Wolfgang. Delinquency in a Birth Cohort II: Philadelphia, 1958-1988. ICPSR09293-v3. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1994. doi:10.3886/ICPSR09293.v3

Scope of Study

Summary:

The purpose of this data collection was to follow a birth cohort born in Philadelphia during 1958 with a special focus on delinquent activities as children and as adults. The respondents were first interviewed in DELINQUENCY IN A BIRTH COHORT IN PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, 1945-1963 (ICPSR 7729). Part 1 offers basic demographic information, such as sex, race, date of birth, church membership, age, and socioeconomic status, on each cohort member. Two files supply offense data: Part 2 pertains to offenses committed while a juvenile and Part 3 details offenses as an adult. Offense-related variables include most serious offense, police disposition, location of crime, reason for police response, complainant's sex, age, and race, type of victimization, date of offense, number of victims, average age of victims, number of victims killed or hospitalized, property loss, weapon involvement, and final court disposition. Part 4, containing follow-up survey interview data collected in 1988, was designed to investigate differences in the experiences and attitudes of individuals with varying degrees of involvement with the juvenile justice system. Variables include individual histories of delinquency, health, household composition, marriage, parent and respondent employment and education, parental contacts with the legal system, and other social and demographic variables.

Subject Terms:

adult offenders, criminal histories, criminal justice system, delinquent behavior, demographic characteristics, disposition (legal), juvenile offenders, police response, victimization

Geographic Coverage:

Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States

Time Period:
  • 1958--1988

Universe:

All children born in Philadelphia during 1958.

Data Types:

event/transaction data, survey data

Data Collection Notes:

When using the Juvenile Offense file (Part 2), users should exclude from analyses any records of offenses committed when the offender was over 17 years of age. All records included in this file represent police contacts. Only a subset of these cases represent true offenses or violations of the Pennsylvania Crime Code. The variable EVENTYPE distinguishes between true offenses and cases that are police contacts only. The crime code fields can also be used to distinguish true offense charges from charges that represent police contacts only. Police contacts are those designated in the crime code value labels by an asterisk directly following the equal sign. For example, "1001 = COUNTERFEIT" represents a true offense, while "2624 = *RUNAWAY" represents a police contact only. To link the interview data from the survey file with either the juvenile delinquency history or adult criminal history databases, the user should utilize the LINKAGE DATABASE, provided in the Follow-Up Interview machine-readable codebook. A data collection instrument is available only for Part 4, the Follow-Up Interview data.

Producers: Sellin Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law and National Analysts, Division of Booz-Allen and Hamilton, Inc., Philadelphia, PA, 1990.

Methodology

Data Source:

police and district attorney records, personal interviews, and self-enumerated questionnaires

Extent of Processing:

All archived data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. The archive also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, the archive performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Standardized missing values.
  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Access and Availability

Note:

Detailed file-level information (such as record length, case count, and variable count) is listed in the file manifest.

Original ICPSR Release:

1990-03-02

Version History:

  • 2006-01-12 All files were removed from dataset 5 and flagged as study-level files, so that they will accompany all downloads.

  • 2006-01-12 All files were removed from dataset 5 and flagged as study-level files, so that they will accompany all downloads.

  • 2005-11-04 On 2005-03-14 new files were added to one or more datasets. These files included additional setup files as well as one or more of the following: SAS program, SAS transport, SPSS portable, and Stata system files. The metadata record was revised 2005-11-04 to reflect these additions.

Dataset(s):
  • DS1: Demographic Cohort Data
  • DS2: Juvenile Offense Data
  • DS3: Adult Offense Data
  • DS4: Survey of Young Adults: 1958 Philadelphia Birth Cohort Follow-Up
  • DS6: Data Collection Instrument for Birth Cohort Follow-Up Data
  • DS7: SAS Data Definition Statements for Demographic Cohort Data
  • DS8: SAS Data Definition Statements for Juvenile Offense Data
  • DS9: SAS Data Definition Statements for Adult Offense Data
  • DS10: SAS Data Definition Statements for Birth Cohort Follow-Up Data