Abstract: An understanding of the relationship between peers and delinquency is at the heart of delinquency research. Large amounts of empirical research support the idea claimed by learning theorists that deviant peer association promotes juvenile delinquency, and this prompt appears in juvenile offenders of different ages, different genders, different developmental trajectories and different delinquency types, even in many juvenile offenders group intervention programs of various kinds. To shed new light on this topic, future studies should choose juveniles from different cultural backgrounds as research objects, and adopt more longitudinal studies, comparative studies and experimental studies to further explore the group differences and the internal mechanisms of this influence, and develop effective intervention measures for it.

Key words: juvenile delinquency, deviant peer association, socialization, group intervention program