Hanging Out with the Wrong Crowd? The Role of Unstructured Socializing in Adolescents’ Specialization in Delinquency and Substance Use

Objectives Despite abundant attention to offending specialization in criminology, scholars have only recently started to explore opportunity-driven explanations for within-individual patterns of specialization. The current study examines whether unstructured socializing with specific friends can explain within-individual changes in adolescents’ degree of specialization in delinquency and substance use.