Analysis on studies of juvenile delinquents in Turkey: systematic review

This study is aimed to systemically review the studies prepared on the casual risk factors of delinquency in our country until 31.12.2019. Therefore, it is focused to reveal the status of casual risk factor studies conducted in the field of delinquency and which risk factors have been identified in a single study comparatively. In this systematic review, in order to collect the studies on delinquency in our country until 31.12.2019, various combinations of these keywords: "crime", "anti-social behavior", "risky behavior", "conduct disorder", "delinquency", "child", "adolescent" and "student" has been made by browsing the databases of Google Academic, National Academic Network and Information Center, Web of Science, Tübitak Supported Projects Database and National Thesis Center between 01.05.2020-15.05.2020. In this search, accordance with the keywords, only language, date and field search were created as type of criteria, total 5.152 theses, articles and projects were reached. Afterwards, these studies were subjected to two-stage elimination according to the criteria which were determined as inclusion and exclusion in the systematic review: "cultural limitation", "research population", "outcome variable" and "research design". According to the criteria, only one study was found to meet the inclusion criteria in this systematic review. Therefore, only the findings of this study were analyzed. Although this study met the specified criteria and presented a prospective longitudinal data analysis, neither its purpose nor the way of analyzing longitudinal data was unable to reveal the causal relationship between variables. According to the result of the systematic review, almost all of the delinquency in our country are examined through cross-sectional studies, therefore, it has been determined that there is a serious lack of prospective longitudinal studies in terms of determining causal risk factors.