THE UTILITY OF SELF-CONCEPT AS A PREDICTOR OF RECIDIVISM AMONG JUVENILE-OFFENDERS

Forty institutionalized male juvenile offenders in the United States w ere administered a Role Construct Repertory Grid (Kelly, 1955) and the Self-Consciousness Scale (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975) to deter mine whether frequent offenders could be differentiated from infrequen t offenders on the basis of these instruments. We hypothesized that th e frequent offenders would have more ''delinquent'' self-concepts than the infrequent offenders. The results did not confirm this hypothesis . In fact, the frequent offender group actually had fewer delinquent s elf-concepts than the offender group, although the trend was not stati stically significant. This finding is interpreted as an indication tha t some offenders who acknowledge their delinquent orientation are bett er able to apply their personal resources toward control of their beha vior.