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Wikström's Situational Action Theory (SAT) explains rule-breaking by reference to the cognitive perception-choice process, which indicates how a person's propensity to break rules interacts with the setting's criminogeneity. SAT's situational model claims that the interaction between personal morality and the moral norms of the setting, the so-called moral filter, is critical in the explanation of rule-breaking, and that the influence of self-control is subordinate to this process. Self-control becomes relevant when individuals whose personal morality discourages rule-breaking are exposed to settings in which the moral norms encourage rule-breaking, that is, if the moral filter is conflicted. Whereas most previous studies have equated the moral filter with personal morality, we consider the moral norms of the setting as well. This allows for a more rigorous test of the moral filter, and thus the conditionality of self-control. Here, we investigate student cheating, using data from two waves of a large-scale German school panel study, and we conceptualise the setting's moral norms by reference to the descriptive norm: other students' cheating behaviour. This ensures the spatio-linkage between the setting's criminogeneity and rule-breaking, which is necessary for investigating SAT. Additionally, our estimation strategy - person and school fixed-effect models - controls for alternative explanations by the selection of people into settings with different levels of criminogeneity. Moreover, it controls for heterogeneity across persons and schools. The findings are in line with SAT's predictions. In cases of a correspondence between personal morality and the moral norms of a setting, students with rule-abiding morality are least likely to cheat, whereas students with a rule-breaking morality are the most likely to cheat. Also, in line with SAT, self-control only matters for students with rule-abiding morality when they are exposed to moral norms that encourage rule-breaking.

This study examines Elijah Anderson's (1999) proposition that violence is more likely in contexts that reward violence with status. However, people react differently to this so-called status-violence norm depending on their code internalisation. We address this interplay between code internalisation and the status-violence norm by analysing violence in 39 German schools, with 2,635 students. We make use of network data on status and violence reports in the large school dataset 'Friendship and Violence in Adolescence'. Our school fixed-effect models account for previous shortcomings, namely heterogeneity between contexts and the selection of people into contexts, as they only compare students of the same school with each other. We find that students who have strongly internalised the code are more prone to violence than students who have not internalised this code. More importantly, our results show that students with a strong code are especially violent when the context rewards violence with status. Students who have not internalised this code are not affected by context variations.

Rule-breaking is an actor's reaction to the behavioral setting to which they are exposed. Understanding this interplay between a person and their behavioral setting is significant for developing crime prevention measures and understanding crime as a social phenomenon. The action-generating mechanism explains rule-breaking via the interplay between actors' criminal propensity and behavioral settings' criminogeneity. It addresses what would have happened if a person's criminal propensity and a setting's criminogeneity had been different. Previous tests of the action-generating mechanism on observational data failed to control for actors' exposure to different kinds of behavioral settings and, thus, also for selection. The selection mechanism precedes the action-generating mechanism and challenges previous findings while people are systematically exposed to different behavioral settings and also levels of criminogeneity. I control for selection and thus provide a more rigorous test by using fixed-effect estimation models and strategically using the school setting of the Friendship and Violence in Adolescent data. The research approach is applied to hypotheses derived from Anderson's Code of the Street (study 1) and Wikström's Situational Action Theory (study 2 and study 3). All-in-all, the results indicate that exposure matters net of the selection of kinds-of-people into kinds-of settings.

Eine Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe birgt für alle Beteiligten Nachteile: Die Verurteilten sind mit negativen persönlichen und sozialen Konsequenzen konfrontiert, für den Staat entstehen erhebliche Kosten; zudem gehören die Geldstrafenschuldner nicht in den Strafvollzug. In NRW wurde ein einheitliches Verfahren eingeführt, das Verurteilte bei der Abwendung der Haftstrafen durch die Ableistung gemeinnütziger Arbeit unterstützen soll. Zu diesem Zweck müssen die vollstreckenden Staatsanwaltschaften vermehrt auf die Unterstützung durch ambulante Soziale Dienste und freie Träger zurückgreifen. Das Institut für Kriminologie der Universität zu Köln evaluierte das Vorgehen. Die über ein Mixed-methods-Design gewonnenen Ergebnisse liegen erstmals in diesem Band vor. Neben der Auswertung amtlicher Daten wird ein Bild von der Lage der Verurteilten gezeichnet. Zudem werden die Zusammenarbeit von Staatsanwaltschaften und anderen Organisationen untersucht sowie Handlungsempfehlungen für Politik und Praxis abgeleitet

Background: COVID-19 is a threat to individual and global health, thus, reducing the disease's spread is of significant importance. However, adherence to behavioral measures against the spread of COVID-19 is not universal, even within vulnerable populations who are at higher risk of exposure to the virus or severe COVID-19 infection. Therefore, this study investigates how risk-group membership relates to adherence to COVID-19 behavioral measures, whether perceived threat of COVID-19 is a mechanism explaining this relationship, and whether knowledge about COVID-19 moderates these effects. Methods: We conducted a web-based survey (N = 4,096) representative of the adult population in Germany with regard to gender, age (18 to 74), and province. Therein, we assessed risk group membership with two indicators (risk of exposure to COVID-19 and risk of severe COVID-19 infection), perceived COVID-19 threat with the Perceived Coronavirus Threat Questionnaire, knowledge about COVID-19 with a knowledge test; and adherence to six behavioral measures to protect against the spread of COVID-19 (e.g., keeping distance, using mouth-nose protection, and following contact restrictions). We used moderated mediation models to test whether perceived threat mediates the relationship between risk-group membership and adherence and whether knowledge about COVID-19 moderates this relationship. Results: We found that risk group members had more perceived COVID-19 threat and that knowledge about COVID-19 increased perceived threat. Moreover, risk group membership had a positive direct effect on adherence to most behavioral measures and risk group members with less knowledge about COVID-19 violated measures more frequently. Risk-group membership also had positive indirect effects on adherence via perceived COVID-19 threat. The moderated indirect effects of threat indicate that threat led to more adherence when knowledge was low, but lost relevance as knowledge increased. Conclusion: The results may help to evaluate disease-regulation measures and to combat the pandemic more effectively. For example, increasing COVID-19 knowledge in the general population could increase adherence to COVID-19 behavioral measures. However, policy makers should be mindful that this could also have negative mental health implications as knowledge increases perceived COVID-19 threat.

Police data and survey research provide different bases to inform research on crime and delinquency. We argue that linking police data on local crime incidences to criminological surveys allows for new insights on the role of residential and school contexts for juvenile delinquency and violence. We describe the challenges and solutions of combining these data sources in a collaboration between the state police of North Rhine-Westphalia – Germany's most populous state – and social scientists from a major German university. In this academic-practitioner partnership, data from a four-wave longitudinal study of more than 3800 students were linked to spatially aggregated data from the police crime statistics for the years 2013–2016. We discuss how the simulation of nearby addresses can serve as a tool for anonymized data linkage, how knowledge of the local data collection practices is crucial to evaluate the geocoding accuracy of address-level crime data, and how sensitivity and implication analyses can help to reduce uncertainties at the analysis stage. We also give recommendations for future research and data collection practices.