School Experience During Adolescence: A Comparative Study Between Adolescent Offenders and Not Offenders

Abstract This study aimed to test the school control model, inherent to the Social and Personal Control Theory, verifying which context variables and mechanisms would distinguish offender adolescents from non-offenders adolescents, aiming to understand their school experience. Sixty male adolescents (15 school-dropouts-offenders/15 student-offenders, 15 school-dropouts-non-offenders/15 students-non-offenders), aged 14 to 18 participated (M=16,6; SD=0,78). All responded a scale formulated in the light of the theoretical framework. Data were analyzed by the Kruskall-Wallis test, with Dunn post-test. The results showed that everyone would be to some extent vulnerable to negative school-experience, depending on the context variables, and also indicated that “performance” and “school-bond” would be more associated with school-dropout, while “school constraints” with involvement in infractions. The identification of these problematic aspects in the schooling of the offender adolescents helps to think about the interventions, in the socio-educational accompaniment, aiming at an adequate (re)insertion in the school.