ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the exploration of adolescents' involvement in crime and focuses upon the opportunities that adolescents see as available to them to offend, and the choices they make as to whether or not to do so. It introduces the main measure of self-reported offending, the Australian Self-Report Delinquency Scale and describes factors associated with adolescents' most recent offences, such as whether the act was planned or spontaneous or committed alone or with friends. The chapter discusses the ways in which adolescents understand criminality and conformity at a more personal level. It examines the ways in which offending behaviours and motivations for crime are affected by gender and cohort membership. Cohort differences are also apparent and are even more striking than sex differences. The means for the School cohort are considerably lower than the other cohorts', for each type of crime, and a significant number had not participated in any of the acts in the generalized measure of delinquency.
