Protective factors against the intergenerational transmission of crime – A total population study based on national registers from Sweden

One of the most important risk factors for crime is parental offending, yet little is known about protective factors that reduce the risk of intergenerational transmission of crime.

The overarching goal with the proposed project is to understand the nature of the associations between protective factors and the intergenerational transmission of crime as well as the relative significance of different protective factors while accounting for confounding effects from familial factors.The proposed project will capitalize upon the unique resources of Swedish population-based registers, containing longitudinal data on all individuals living and residing in Sweden since 1932.

These data sources are readily available and contain detailed information about criminal convictions on an individual level, within families, and across generations as well as real-world data on biological, psychological, and social protective factors.

Analyses will be on a population-level and within siblings.The results promise novel insights into mitigating risk for crime among offspring of convicted parents while taking unmeasured familial confounds into account.

By understanding the potential causal nature of associations between factors that reduce the risk of criminality being passed down from one generation to the next, we can focus intervention and prevention strategies more efficiently which will promote safer and healthier communities. Such insights will also be important for informing future research.