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Also speaking at the press conference, the Director of the Social Sciences Research Centre of the University of Hong Kong, Dr John Bacon-Shone, the spokesman for the research team said the research had been large scale and territory wide.
"More than 2,100 students from 30 secondary schools and five technical institutes, and 200 young persons from seven youth centres over the territory completed a detailed questionnaire. The research team also interviewed about 400 young people who were known to be offenders," he said.
"We then analysed the data and came up with our research findings," he said.
The following are the major findings of the research:
* Self-reported delinquency is widespread, but the majority of delinquent acts are committed by only a small proportion of young people (for example, 51 per cent of all delinquent acts mentioned in the questionnaire were committed by only 11 per cent of the sample).
* Delinquency and recidivism among young people are largely the result of subcultural factors (for example, undesirable leisure activities, lifestyles and friends or level of involvement in marginal youth subcultures) and negative labelling, especially from schools. In general, delinquents tend to spend less time at home with parents, more time with friends and in public places, such as amusement games centres, and they hold anti-school attitudes.
* "Problem behaviour" does not necessarily lead to delinquency. Indeed, the study suggests that the relationship is complex, and often the reverse is the case. In general, the data suggest that there are different pathways to delinquency.
* Family members often monitor delinquents and detect delinquency - this suggests that many families do monitor their young members and do not simply allow them to go their own way.
* While many young offenders do escalate from committing property offences to crimes against the person, the violence involved is usually minor.
* There are some associations, although not a direct causal relationship, between mass media consumption and delinquency. Mass media consumption can be regarded as part of a wider subcultural array of behaviour that influences delinquency.
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