Immediate antecedents to adolescents' offenses

The current research examined importance ratings by adolescent offenders of immediate antecedents to their offenses. One hundred and fifteen adolescent offenders consecutively admitted to an inpatient psychiatric unit for court-ordered assessment completed the High Risk Situations Questionnaire for Young Offenders (HRSQ-YO). an instrument designed to assess the self-reported importance of various antecedents to a past, highly salient. offense. Principal components analysis of responses to the 71 items of the HRSQ-YO resulted in three factors which were rotated to a varimax criterion and labelled Negative Affectivity. Delinquency, and Aggressivity. Delinquency factor scores were significantly higher for property offenses than for violent offenses, whereas Aggressivity factor scores were significantly higher for violent offenses than for property offenses. Negative Affectivity factor scores did not differ between property and violent offenses. Implications of the results for relapse prevention approaches to the reduction of recidivism among adolescent offenders are discussed. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons.