Research Article Contemporaneous and Lagged Effects of Life Domains and Substance Use: A Test of Agnew’s General Theory of Crime and Delinquency Fawn T. Ngo 1 and Raymond Paternoster 2 1 College of Arts & Sciences, Division of Criminology, University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee, 8350 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, FL 34243, USA 2 Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland, 2129 LeFrak Hall, College Park, MD 20741, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Fawn T. Ngo; fawnngo@sar.usf.edu Received 30 September 2013; Revised 30 November 2013; Accepted 2 December 2013; Published 27 January 2014 Academic Editor: Kevin M. Beaver Copyright © 2014 F. T. Ngo and R. Paternoster. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Tis study presents a partial test of Agnew’s general theory of crime and delinquency. Relying on a sample of adolescents and employing measures of the self, family, school, and peers domains, this study examines the contemporaneous and lagged efects of these four life domains on the likelihood of consuming alcohol and using marijuana. Tis study also assesses the contemporaneous and lagged efects of the life domain variables on themselves and on one another. Overall, the results lend support for Agnew’s general theory. Te results also reveal several notable puzzles and underscore the complexity of this potentially important contemporary theoretical perspective. 1. Introduction In 2005, Robert Agnew introduced his general theory of crime and delinquency with the publication of Why Criminals Ofend: A General Teory of Crime and Delinquency. Agnew’s general theory is an integrated inductive theory built upon a foundation of empirical research fndings of the causes of crime with a focus on those variables having direct efects on crime and the relationship among them (for a discussion of this type of theoretical integration, see [1]). At the heart of the theory are fve clusters or “life domains” of variables and each one Agnew claims has been proven to be a robust correlate of crime. Tese fve domains—self, family, peers, school, and work—represent the best known covariates in the existing literature for explaining why some individuals are more likely to engage in crime than others. Agnew’s risk-factor based general theory was intended to account for between-individual diferences in the risk of committing crime. Agnew’s general theory is an even more ambitious theory in that it seeks to account for all types of crime, address the “known facts” of crime, explicate micro- and macro patterns of crime, and guide policies in preventing and controlling crime [2]. Accordingly, Agnew’s general theory represents a poten- tially important contribution to the feld of criminology and knowledge about crime and criminals. However, to date, there has only been one published test of Agnew’s theory and even these researchers were only able to provide a partial test of his perspective [3]. Tis fact is understandable since Agnew’s theory is a complex one and even Agnew [2, page 185] himself acknowledges that: At present, however, there are few data sets that allow for anything close to a full test. Also, a full test would impose large demands on the data and computational programs, as large number of efects require estimation, including reciprocal, nonlinear, and interactional efects. Given these facts, the general theory is probably best tested in bits and pieces. In the current study, we extend the work undertaken by previous researchers as well as follow Agnew’s suggestion Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Criminology Volume 2014, Article ID 320486, 20 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/320486