A Change in Time Spent on Homework as a Possible Turning Point for Youth with a History of Serious Delinquency: Testing the Intervening Influence of Cognitive and Moral Agency

This study tested whether time spent on homework could be considered a turning point for youth with serious prior involvement in delinquency. A sample of 934 youth (809 boys, 125 girls) from the Pathways to Desistance study who attended a community or institutional school during baseline and Wave 1 of the Pathways study served as participants in this study. The results of a four-equation path analysis revealed that while a change in time spent on homework did not have a direct effect on later delinquency, the indirect effect was significant when unsupervised routine activities served as a first-stage mediator and cognitive and moral agency served as second-stage mediators. Hence, spending an increased amount of time on homework was associated with a concurrent decrease in unsupervised routine activities with friends and led to increased levels of cognitive and moral agency in serious delinquent youth, which, in turn, appeared to contribute to heightened levels of future desistance. The key to understanding the turning point identified in this study appears to have been a change in unsupervised routine activities.