Explaining Crime Events and Criminal Careers

Abstract

Abstract This chapter outlines in detail the foundation and key propositions of Situational Action Theory (SAT) and its Developmental Ecological Action (DEA) model , providing an up-to-date account addressing key questions and challenges that have been raised by other scholars. The DEA model is the application of SAT to the problem of explaining continuity and changes in people’s crime involvement, and will guide empirical analyses of criminal careers in subsequent chapters. This chapter details and discusses the basic concepts and assumptions underpinning the DEA model, including those relating to the nature of crime events, people, and societies. It presents the key entities (units of analysis), main causal elements, and basic causal processes the DEA model proposes involved in the explanation of crime and criminal careers, with particular attention to key psychoecological processes associated with the development of crime propensities—moral education and cognitive nurturing—and socioecological processes associated with the development of criminogenic activity fields—self and social selection. It also compares and contrasts SAT with a number of influential criminological theories to highlight and clarify distinctions between SAT’s theoretical propositions and common criminological assumptions, e.g. rational choice theory, social and self-control theories, differential association and social learning theory, and the theory of moral disengagement. This chapter concludes that SAT provides a dynamic explanation of crime events and patterns over time, an assertion that is tested in subsequent chapters.