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ROUTINE ACTIVITIES AND INDIVIDUAL DEVIANT BEHAVIOR*
We extend the routine activity perspective's situational analysis of crime to individual offending and to a broad range of deviant behaviors. In this view, unstructured socializing with peers in the absence of authority figures presents opportunities for deviance: In the presence of peers, deviant acts will be easier and more rewarding; the absence of authority figures reduces the potential for social control responses to deviance; and the lack of structure leaves time available for deviant behavior. To determine whether individuals who spend more time in unstructured socializing activities engage in deviant behaviors more frequently, we analyzed within-individual changes in routine activities and deviance across five waves of data for a national sample of more than 1,70018- to 26-year-olds. Participation in these routine activities was strongly associated with criminal behavior, heavy alcohol use, use of marijuana and other illicit drugs, and dangerous driving. Furthermore, routine activities accounted for a substantial portion of the association between these deviant behaviors and age, sex, and socioeconomic status.
The emergence of theories of crime that emphasize the influence of routine activities (Cohen and Felson 1979) or lifestyle (Hindelang, Gottfredson, and Garofalo 1978) is one of the most significant developments in the study of deviance over the past two decades.1 This situational approach shifts attention away from the personal histories of offenders toward the dependence of crime on opportunities presented by the routine activities of everyday life. Birkbeck and LaFree (1993) note that this shift corresponds to Sutherland's (1947) distinction between historical explanations, which account for crime by past events, and situational explanations, which account for crime by the circumstances in which it occurs. Routine activity theorists have applied this situational approach to explain group differences in victimization (Hindelang et al. 1978) and trends in aggregate crime rates (Cohen and Felson 1979) in terms of the social structure's impact on routine activities.
According to Meier and Miethe (1993: 472-73), sociologists find the routine activity perspective appealing because it identifies a symbiotic relationship between conventional activities and illegal activities and points to fundamental ironies in links between some otherwise constructive social changes and increasing crime (e.g., women's employment and daytime burglary). The routine activity perspective challenges the commonplace notion that crime must stem from other "bad"...