PurposeDespite a recent surge of interest in the role that self-identity plays in the process of desistance from crime, prior research has been mostly qualitative and conducted with small samples of adult offenders. In addition, while what people expect to become in the future can also function as motivational and sustaining forces toward prosocial behavioral outcomes, empirical tests of identity-based theories of criminal desistance have focused on the measures of current self-identity. We intend to address both gaps to expand the scope of desistance literature.MethodsDrawing on 11-wave panel data of serious adolescent offenders, a modified version of negative binomial random-effects models is applied to estimate the within-individual effects of expectation of positive future selves on self-reported offending and official record of arrest.ResultsWe found that a shift in a youth’s expectation of positive self-identity in the future is significantly related to a downward trend in both offending and arrest outcomes. This finding holds even after controlling for unobserved time-stable sources of heterogeneity and other important time-varying sources of potential confounders.ConclusionsThis study not only explores one of the understudied topics in the desistance literature but also provides evidence-based knowledge on which characteristics need to be addressed to initiate and maintain prosocial life styles among serious adolescent offenders.

中文翻译：

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积极的预期自我和严重青少年犯罪者的抵抗力

目的尽管最近人们对身份认同在摆脱犯罪过程中所扮演的角色的兴趣激增，但先前的研究大多是定性的，并以少量成年罪犯进行了研究。此外，尽管人们期望将来会成为亲社会行为结果的动力和维持力，但基于身份的犯罪停止理论的实证检验已将重点放在当前自我身份的衡量上。我们打算解决这两个差距，以扩大抗争性文献的范围。方法利用严重青少年犯罪者的11波面板数据，使用负面二项式随机效应模型的修改版来估计对正向未来的预期的内部影响自我报告犯罪和官方逮捕记录。结果我们发现，青年对未来积极自我认同的期望的变化与犯罪和逮捕结果的下降趋势显着相关。即使在控制了无法观察到的时间稳定的异质性来源和其他潜在的混杂因素的重要时变来源之后，这一发现仍然成立。结论本研究不仅探讨了阻抗文献中未被研究的主题之一，而且还提供了基于证据的知识，以了解哪些特性需要致力于在严重的青少年罪犯中倡导和维持亲社会的生活方式。