The relationship between school performance, delinquency and early school-leaving

Juvenile risky behaviour has increasingly become of interest to both policymakers and researchers during the past decades. Risky behaviour does not only relate to obvious forms of negative behaviour like drug abuse and delinquency, but also to truancy and early school-leaving (Jessor, 1991, Jessor et al., 1998). Junger and Van der Laan (1997) describe risky behaviour as ‘every type of behaviour that poses an unreasonable risk of negative consequences for the individual or others concerning their economic, mental, physical, or social functioning’. In this chapter we will focus on two important forms of risky behaviour: delinquency and early school-leaving. The two forms of risky behaviour are clearly related: young adolescents who become criminally active may decide to leave school early. But the reverse may also be true: early school-leavers have a higher probability to become engaged in criminal activity and/or to be arrested (Freeman, 1999, Lochner, 2004). In this sense there is an interesting dynamic relationship between the two forms of risky behaviour.