Social Context and the Static and Dynamic Age–Crime Relationship in the Republic of Korea

The age–crime curve has been regarded as a stylized fact of the age–crime relationship. However, recent studies have found that some Asian countries have an age–crime distribution that deviates from the archetypal age–crime curve. This variation has been attributed to cultural factors associated with age effects. Using age-specific arrest data from Korea for the years 1976 through 2019, this study offers a complementary explanation of divergent age–crime patterns across countries. We make an empirical case that the observed difference between the Korean age–crime distribution and the archetypical age–crime curve in Western countries cannot be due to contextual influence on age effects alone. The age–crime relationship in Korea shows both static and dynamic characteristics. The age–period–cohort analysis of variance shows that age effects largely explain the age–crime relationship, but period and cohort effects also explain the change in the age–crime relationship over time. Moreover, the extent to which each effect manifests depends on the type of crime. Based on our findings, we propose hypotheses regarding the role of social context in shaping each effect. We suggest that cultural factors largely shaped age effects by creating age-graded changes in the social control mechanism and in routine activities. In addition, we suggest that other contextual factors, such as population dynamics, simultaneously shaped period and cohort effects by changing the level of social control, and routine activities across birth cohorts. Both cultural and historical dimensions of social context are required to understand divergent age–crime patterns across countries.