Reflections on youth transitions and crime: 25 years of the Edinburgh Study

• In Event: Reflections on Juvenile Justice and Youth Crime - Special Panel Celebrating 25 Years of ESC

Abstract

Life-course research has many strengths over other methodological approaches, not least that it allows us to gain a long term perspective on the factors that shape people’s behaviour and the twists and turns that their lives take. However, it is also fraught with difficulties, not least finding the resources needed to conduct such research over the long term and ensuring that you bring your cohort with you. For the last 25 years, we have followed a single age cohort of people from early adolescence into early middle age. In this paper, we will discuss what we have learned about the lives of our cohort members as they have grown up, and the implications of our findings for criminological theory. In doing so we will reflect on the realities of studying one single cohort in the context of macro-level societal, technological, and geopolitical change: what it tells us about the aeitology of rule breaking behaviours and key transitions into adulthood, and with what implications for justice policy and reform.

Author

• Susan McVie, University of Edinburgh