Dynamic Sequencing Methods for Studying Turning Points in the Criminal Career

9308560雅培这个项目将开发和采用一种新的方法来分析个人生活中的犯罪职业。该项目将从犯罪、刑事司法制裁(例如，逮捕、监禁)、就业和婚姻四个方面对从童年到成年的生活事件进行连续描绘。基于年龄分级的社会控制理论，重点是制裁、就业和婚姻事件的顺序如何与犯罪生涯的变化和转折点相关。一个重要的假设是，监禁的顺序和工作的不稳定会导致犯罪的明显转折点。通过开发和扩展新的最佳匹配方法来检测序列数据中的相似性，该项目试图确定生命过程中是否存在将犯罪生涯转向特定方向的关键阶段。该项目的数据来自一项经典的纵向研究(谢尔顿和埃莉诺·格鲁克)，该研究对500名违法者和500名非违法者从青春期到32岁进行了跟踪调查。为了进行这种新的分析，研究小组将重建这些数据。工作和婚姻历史序列的生活记录将与45岁以下犯罪生涯的更新数据一起进行编码和分析。拟议的“最佳匹配”方法旨在发现与生命过程中显著事件有关的不同犯罪模式。***

9308560 ABBOTT This project will develop and employ a new methodolgy for analyzing criminal careers across individual lives. The project will result in a sequential picture of life events from childhood to adulthood in four dimensions -- crime, criminal justice sanctions (e.g., arrest, incarceration), employment and marriage. Based on an age- graded theory of social control, the focus is on how the sequencing of sanctioning, employment and marital events are related to changes and turning points in the criminal career. A major hypothesis is that sequences of incarceration followed by job instability produce distinct turning points toward crime. By developing and extending new optimal-matching methods for detecting resemblance in sequence data, the project seeks to establish whether or not there are critical stages of the life course that turn criminal careers in particular directions. The data for this project stem from a classic longitudinal study (by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck) of 500 delinquents and 500 nondelinquents followed from adolescence to age 32. These data will be reconstructed by the research team for the purpose of this new kind of analysis. Life records of the sequencing of job and marital histories will be coded and analyzed in conjunction with more recent data on criminal careers up to age 45. The proposed methodology of "optimal matching" aims to detect distinct patterns of crime associated with salient events over the course of life. ***