Dynamic Sequencing Methods for Studying Turning Points in the Criminal Career

9308560 ABBOTT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生涯。 该项目将在犯罪、刑事司法制裁（例如， 逮捕、监禁）、就业和婚姻。 基于社会控制的年龄分级理论，重点是如何制裁，就业和婚姻事件的顺序与犯罪生涯的变化和转折点有关。 一个主要的假设是，工作不稳定的监禁序列产生了明显的犯罪转折点。 通过开发和推广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。 该项目的数据源自一项经典的纵向研究（由谢尔顿和埃莉诺·格鲁克进行），该研究对500名青少年和500名非青少年进行了从青春期到32岁的跟踪研究。 这些数据将由研究小组重建，用于这种新的分析。 工作和婚姻历史的顺序的生活记录将被编码和分析，与45岁以下犯罪生涯的最新数据一起。 拟议的“最佳匹配”方法旨在发现与生命过程中的突出事件相关的不同犯罪模式。 ***

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. ***