Professor Per-Olof Wikström of the Law Faculty’s Institute of Criminology received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology from the Swedish Minister of Justice at the Nobel Prize Banquet Hall of the Stockholm Stadthus on Wednesday, 15 June.
Professor Wikström was honoured by an international jury for the development and testing of his Situational Action Theory of decisions to commit crime, in relation to his £4 million ESRC-funded study of over 980,000 hours in the lives of some 700 young people in Peterborough.
The work of Per-Olof Wikström, who is the first Swedish criminologist to win the prize, offers the most detailed evidence on the dynamic processes by which children negotiate their daily lives between their parents and peers. In a ten-year study of 716 families in the ethnically diverse city of Peterborough, England, Wikström developed his own Situational Action Theory in expanding greatly the earlier findings of his co-winners. Measuring behaviour by day-by-day tracking of where the adolescents were, with how many peers, in what criminogenic or morally hazardous environments, Wikstrom was able to test predictions of criminality in new ways. His data included exposure to morally hazardous situations, as well as teenagers’ moral beliefs and propensity to commit crimes.
By frequently interviewing parents as well as children, Wikström added major insights into the role parents play in preventing juvenile crime by restricting access to criminogenic peers and shaping the morality of their children.