Understanding Juvenile Offending Trajectories
| Date | 01 December 2008 |
| Author | Michael Livingston,Anna Stewart,Troy Allard,James Ogilvie |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.41.3.345 |
| Published date | 01 December 2008 |
345
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 41 NUMBER 3 2008 PP. 345–363
Address for Correspondence: Anna Stewart, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice,
Mt Gravatt Campus, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, 4111. E-mail: A.Stewart@
griffith.edu.au
Understanding Juvenile Offending
Trajectories
Michael Livingston, Anna Stewart, Troy Allard and James Ogilvie
Griffith University, Australia
Aconsiderable amount of international research has adopted a criminal
careers framework to improve our understanding of offending
patterns across the life course. Recent innovations in statistical modelling
techniques such as Semi-Parametric Group-based Method (SPGM) have
provided researchers with tools to model offending trajectories.While
this framework and these techniques may improve our understanding of
life course offending patterns, few Australian studies have adopted such
an approach. SPGM was employed in the current study to model the
offending patterns of the 1983–84 Queensland offender cohort (n=
4,470) to address three research questions: (1) How many distinct
offending trajectories could be identified and what was the nature of
these trajectories? (2) How were sex, Indigenous status, socioeconomic
disadvantage, and remoteness related to offending trajectory member-
ship? and (3) Are juvenile offending trajectories predictors of adult
offending? Findings indicated that there were three distinct groups of
juvenile offenders: Early Peaking–Moderate Offenders, Late Onset–
Moderate Offenders, and Chronic Offenders. Males and Indigenous
offenders were overrepresented in the chronic offending trajectory.
Support for the utility of the model was found, as Chronic Offenders
were more likely to have offended as adults. The theoretical and practical
implications of these findings are discussed and the need for further
trajectory research within an Australian context is emphasised.
The criminal careers framework has been extensively used in the international
literature to improve our understanding of offending patterns over the developmen-
tal life course (Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, & Visher, 1986; Cain, 1997; Carcach &
Leverett, 1999; Chen, Matruglio, Weatherburn, & Hua, 2005; Farrington, 2003a;
Lynch, Buckman, & Krenske, 2003; Marshall, 2006; Piquero, Farrington, &
Blumstein, 2003a). This framework is concerned with continuity and change in the
nature and pattern of criminality over time, including onset or initiation, termina-
tion or desistence and duration or career length of offending (Blumstein, Cohen, &
Farrington, 1988; Farrington & West, 1990). More recently, Developmental and
Life-course Criminology (DLC) has extended the notion of criminal careers to
include exploration of how the dynamic nature of risk factors or changes that occur
over the life course are related to particular offending pathways (Farrington, 2003b;
National Crime Prevention, 1999).
DLC attempts to understand the development of offending and antisocial behav-
iour, risk factors across different ages and the effects of life events on the course of
development (Farrington, 2003b). Broadly speaking, developmental approaches view
the life course as a series of phases, a series of points of change, a series of transitions,
rather than a fixed progression towards adulthood determined by factors early in life
(Elder, 1994; National Crime Prevention, 1999). This approach focuses on pathways
with a multitude of outcomes, and aspects of time and timing of life events and
transition points in order to understand developmental outcomes (Elder, 1994;
National Crime Prevention, 1999). Importantly, the approach has the potential to
inform research on offending behaviour, including the differences over time both
within and between individuals, in an effort to understand both how and when to
intervene (Carcach & Leverett, 1999; Marshall, 2006).
A developmental trajectory refers to a pathway of development over the life
course relating to long-term patterns and sequences of behaviour (Nagin &
Tremblay, 2005; Sampson & Laub, 2005). The analysis of developmental trajecto-
ries in such fields as criminology and psychopathology provides researchers with the
ability to understand the development of normative and non-normative behaviour
over the life course. It allows researchers to examine the pathways of adaptation and
nonadaptation that individuals follow to arrive at particular outcomes (Chung, Hill,
Hawkins, Gilchrist, & Nagin, 2002; Kokko, Tremblay, Lacourse, Nagin, & Vitaro,
2006; Wiesner, Kim, & Capaldi, 2005). Recent innovations in statistical modelling
techniques, including Semi-Parametric Group-based Modelling (SPGM; Nagin,
1999; Nagin & Land, 1993), and Latent Growth Mixture Modelling (LGMM;
Muthén & Muthén, 2000) have provided DLC researchers with the tools to model
heterogeneity and homogeneity across offending trajectories (Kreuter & Muthén,
2008; Nagin & Tremblay, 1999; Wiesner et al., 2005). Such developments are vital
to advance our knowledge of the factors associated with different offending trajecto-
ries across different points in the life course.
The present study applied SPGM to model the juvenile offending trajectories of
an Australian offender cohort, as comparatively few Australian studies have
adopted criminal career or life course perspectives to examine offending patterns
longitudinally (e.g., see Marshall, 2006). In Australia, understanding the offending
careers of Indigenous young people is central to understanding juvenile offending.
This study examined the relationships among Indigenous status and gender, while
controlling for socioeconomic status and remoteness, and juvenile offending trajec-
tories. Finally, the relationship between the juvenile offending trajectories and
offending as a young adult was explored.
Theoretical Debates
Within the DLC perspective, there exists significant diversity in theoretical models
and debate among them in terms of how best to account for continuity and change
in antisocial behaviour over the lifespan, known as the age–crime debate (Brame,
Bushway, Paternoster, & Thornberry, 2005; Farrington, 2003b; Nagin &
346
MICHAEL LIVINGSTON, ANNA STEWART, TROY ALLARD AND JAMES OGILVIE
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
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