Glen Elder's Influence on Life-Course Criminology: Serendipity and Cross-Disciplinary Fertilization

Abstract

In this manuscript, we discuss the interdisciplinary influence of Glen Elder on the core ideas of life-course criminology and the role of serendipity in research discoveries. In describing the intellectual roots and evolution of this perspective we describe our long-term project on the life course of crime using a unique data archive—the Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency study and subsequent follow ups. We illustrate how Elder played a key role in the development and scope of our research program. Many of the key ideas from the life course—trajectories, transitions, turning points, behavioral continuity and change—generate important insight and understanding of crime and human development over the life course.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Mike Shanahan, Jeylan Mortimer, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

¹For more than 20 years, our research program has investigated the life course of crime. We coined the term “life-course criminology” to describe our theoretical and empirical work. Although other criminological theory and research may well fit with some of the ideas of life-course criminology, we have no way of assessing Glen Elder's influence on the research activities of other scholars. For a current discussion of the points of contention and debate in life-course criminology we refer the reader to Sampson and Laub (2005).

²Elder's intellectual influence on our work occurred in numerous ways. For instance, Elder invited us to participate in panels at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in 1990 and 1993. Even more memorable, Elder encouraged and facilitated our involvement in the meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development in Amsterdam in 1993. Thus, in many ways, Elder shepherded our entry into the world of life-course research. Equally important, these conferences provided opportunities for continued discussion with Elder and other colleagues over dinner and drinks.

³In our analyses of the Glueck data, we found that the strongest and most consistent effects on official and unofficial delinquency flow from the social processes of family, school, and peers. Low levels of parental supervision; erratic, threatening, and harsh discipline; and weak parental attachment were strongly related to delinquency. School attachment had large negative effects on delinquency independent of family processes. Attachment to delinquent peers had a significant positive effect on delinquency regardless of family and school process. Further analyses did reveal, however, that family and school processes appear most important in the causal chain (for details see Sampson & Laub, 1993, chapters 4 and 5).

⁴In our analyses of the Glueck data, we found that independent of age, IQ, neighborhood socioeconomic status, and ethnicity, the original delinquents and nondelinquents displayed behavioral consistency—both homotypic and heterotypic—well into adulthood. Indeed, delinquency and other forms of antisocial conduct in childhood were strongly related to troublesome adult behavior including crime, incarceration, economic dependency, unemployment, marital discord, and divorce (for details see Sampson & Laub, 1993, chapter 6). The delinquents and nondelinquents in the Gluecks' study displayed considerable between-individual stability in crime and many problematic behaviors well into adulthood. But why? One of the mechanisms of continuity that we emphasized was “cumulative disadvantage,” whereby serious delinquency and its nearly inevitable correlates (such as incarceration) undermined later bonds of informal social control (such as employability), which in turn enhanced the chances of continued offending (see Sampson & Laub, 1997).

⁵In our analyses of the Glueck data, we found that job stability and marital attachment in adulthood were significantly related to changes in adult crime—the stronger the adult ties to work and family, the less crime and deviance. Despite differences in early childhood experiences, adult social bonds to work and family thus had similar consequences for the life course trajectories of the 500 delinquents and 500 nondelinquent controls. These results were consistent for a wide variety of crime outcome measures, control variables (e.g., childhood antisocial behavior and individual-difference constructs) and analytical techniques ranging from methods that accounted for persistent unobserved heterogeneity in criminal propensity to analyses of qualitative data (see Sampson & Laub, 1993, chapters 7–9).

⁶Recently, we introduced a counterfactual life-course approach to address the selection problem in marriage. Drawing on an extensive battery of individual and family background measures gathered from childhood at age 17 (before entry into marriage) and applying inverse probability of treatment weighting to yearly longitudinal data on marriage, crime, and a variety of time-varying covariates in adulthood, we found that being married was associated with an average reduction of 35% in the odds of crime compared with nonmarried states for the same man. See Sampson, Laub, and Wimer (2006) for more details.