ABSTRACT
The characteristics of a society can influence the level and nature of crime. Social cohesion is known to reduce crime, while relative deprivation can increase it. This chapter describes some of the key features of Irish society that might impact on crime and desistance and provides a socio-demographic profile of the areas that were home to the men who took part in the study. It outlines the research design and data sources that were used in the study and explains how the participants were selected and recruited. An important aim of the research was to explore the psychological and social circumstances that support desistance and to examine their relationship with offending behaviour. The Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles v4.0 is an 80-item questionnaire which measures eight thinking styles that support criminal behaviour: mollification, cutoff, entitlement, power orientation, sentimentality, super-optimism, cognitive indolence, and discontinuity. Information about offending was collected through a combination of self-report questionnaires and file-based information.
