Same or Different?: Comparing Offender Groups and Covariates Over Time

Recent theoretical and empirical work in criminology supports the classification of individuals in criminal groups, where groups differ in the determinants of antisocial behavior and resulting trajectories of offending over time. This article presents methods for finding distinctions between offender groups in key time-varying factors: measures of social control, negative parent labels, delinquent peers, and family structure. The authors use self-report data on 835 males from the National Youth Survey and apply group-based modeling to estimate three age-crime trajectories, corresponding to three offender groups. Emerging from the analysis is a view of offender groups, as defined by age-crime trajectories, that combines elements of typological and general theories of crime. Individuals in the sample, although widely dissimilar in their offending patterns, share common fundamental processes that influence their criminal behavior. However, the nature of that influence appears to differ according to the pattern of offending, that is, according to offender group.