The position advanced in this article is that, rather than presenting two
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how macro-level social and cultural conditions increase the likelihood of deviance
among individuals. In this article, I translate Merton's multilevel theory
into a precise causal model and describe how it accounts for variation in
instrumental crime both within and across social collectivities. I then highlight
the research implications of this multilevel model, including the types of data and
methods needed to evaluate the model and the research puzzles that have been largely
overlooked owing to the single-level approaches applied in previous explications of
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