Youth, schools, and the police: How to prevent youth delinquency in diverse societies (YOUSAP)

• Applicant: Dr. Christof Nägel
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 578187812

Dominant accounts of juvenile delinquency highlight moral rules, self-control, delinquent peers, and transitional dynamics during adolescence. While these insights are important, such proximate causes do not represent the most accessible levers for prevention. They also tend to attribute the causes of delinquency almost exclusively to adolescents themselves. A comprehensive sociological analysis must therefore include the broader environment and institutional actors. The research group will focus on two distal causes through which society can respond to and prevent youth crime, and which also feature prominently in political and public debates: school-based social policy as an expression of informal social control and policing as an instrument of formal social control. The research group takes advantage of the rare opportunity that the nationwide Startchancen program—a €20 billion initiative to support disadvantaged students with ethnically diverse student bodies—coincides with the large-scale student survey Friendship and Violence in Adolescence. An additional survey wave in 2027 will enable a staggered difference-in-differences design comparing schools that participate in Startchancen with those that do not, complemented by regression discontinuity and comparative time-series analyses using administrative police data. This enables, for the first time, a rigorous identification of the causal effects of school investments on delinquent behaviour and their mediating mechanisms. In parallel, the role of the police as an institution of formal control will be examined. Beyond standard survey indicators, the planned 2027 school survey embeds a vignette experiment that varies different forms of police discrimination. This makes it possible to analyse the mechanisms through which police encounters strengthen or undermine legitimacy beliefs and compliance. Using the resulting panel and network data, the project also captures how indirect experiences with the police via peers and individual orientations toward norms matter for delinquency. Based on this unique and targeted combination of methods, the research group promises new substantive insights of both scientific and societal relevance. In addition, we will advance the state of theory evaluation by examining the influence of formal and informal control on youth delinquency within a unified research framework that is both integrative and methodologically robust.

• DFG Programme: Emmy Noether Independent Junior Research Groups