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How Exceptional Is India? A Test of Situational Action Theory

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Abstract

This study explores the generalizability of Situational Action Theory (SAT) in India by testing hypotheses related to the person–environment interaction in explaining offending. Drawing on data from a sample of 872 students between the ages of 14 and 17 from an Indian city collected as part of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD3), we tested the hypothesis that Indian youths will report more delinquent acts if they have a higher propensity to commit crime combined with a greater exposure to criminogenic activities. Our findings show unequivocal support for the applicability of SAT in India where youths reported a slight increase in offending behavior if they exercised low self-control or if they were less moralistic (i.e., they were more crime-prone), or when exposed to criminal activities or peers. Consistent with tests of SAT in other contexts, we find that exposure to criminogenic environments increases offending for youth with higher levels of criminal propensity but does not impact youth with lower levels of criminal propensity. We speculate that the overall low rate of delinquent offending coupled with the cultural milieu of Indian youths may explain why criminogenic exposure may be less relevant in light of young people’s strong avoidance of rule-breaking.

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Notes

  1. Central Asia (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan); East Asia (China, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau); South Asia (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nepal, the Maldives); Southeast Asia (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor Leste, Vietnam, Christmas Island, Cocos Islands); and Western Asia (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia).

  2. See Brown (2018) for a discussion of the history of colonial criminology in India.

  3. Another hypothesized interaction effect is the interaction between personal morality and self-control, where self-control is thought to have a greater impact when personal morality is weak. There is also a hypothesized interaction between deterrence and propensity, where perceived deterrence exerts a greater influence when propensity is high (Pauwels et al. 2018, p. 35). But we do not test for these interactions as explained in a later section.

  4. Using the World Values Survey, Inglehart (2004) presented differences in values across different world regions.

  5. ISRD-1 was carried out in 1991–1992 and ISRD-2 in 2006–2008.

  6. For more information, see www.northeastern.edu/isrd/.

  7. There is one exception. In Fig. 2, we make use of findings for the 27 countries for which full data are currently available and the total sample approaches 63,000 young people.

  8. Because in India students in grades 9 through grade 12 are about 1 year older than students in grades 9 to 12 classes in other countries, for this paper the values of the variable “grade” in India has been downshifted by one.

  9. Description of the Indian sample is based on the ISRD3 Technical Report India (Chattoraj, P & Lukash, A)—available upon request from the authors.

  10. The data were processed by the Epidata program and imported into the “sav.” format (SPSS.23 data analysis program).

  11. Pauwels et al. (2018, p. 51) are optimistic about the potential of neural network analyses for future research efforts.

  12. We also ran two additional models, one with only the interaction term and the dependent variable, and another with the interaction term and control variables. The standardized beta coefficients in both models were the same as reported in Model 6.

  13. We also conducted a two-way basic ANOVA with interaction terms, and the overall ANOVA model was significant, as was the interaction term (these results not shown here but are available upon request).

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Acknowledgments

The authors also want to express their gratitude to the Indian ISRD3 research team led by Paromita Chattoraj, School of Law, KITT University, Bhubaneswar, India.

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  1. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Stuti S. Kokkalera & Ineke Haen Marshall

  2. University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA

    Chris E. Marshall

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Appendix

Appendix

1. Self-control items in questionnaire

figure a

2. Shame items in questionnaire (to construct Morality scale)

figure b

3. Pro-social items in questionnaire (to construct Morality scale)

figure c

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Kokkalera, S.S., Marshall, I.H. & Marshall, C.E. How Exceptional Is India? A Test of Situational Action Theory. Asian J Criminol 15, 195–218 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-020-09312-5

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