Abstract
A basic function of criminal career research is to describe patterns of criminal offending. During the history of the criminal career framework, researchers have divided the conceptual terrain of criminal offending into different dimensions. Two such dimensions include offending frequency and offense switching. Although research on both of these dimensions is extensive, there has been little investigation of their relationship to each other. In this article, the authors use juvenile police contact data from the 1945 Philadelphia birth cohort study to address this issue. In so doing, they extend an existing analytical framework that will allowthem to examine the joint distribution of these two variables. Two specific models are compared. The first model hypothesizes that the probability of switching between two categories of offenses (serious violent and all other offenses) will vary with individual offense frequency. The second model hypothesizes that the probability of offense switching and offending frequency are independent of each other. Our analysis suggests that the process implicated by the second model is more consistent with the data.
Published Version
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