This Brief examines criminal careers by providing the most extensive and
comprehensive investigation to date on the official offending,
self-reported offending, and trajectories of offending of the Pittsburgh
Youth Study (PYS) participants. The PYS is a longitudinal study, which
was initiated in 1987, and involves repeated follow-ups on several
community cohorts (starting in grades 1, 4, and 7) of inner-city boys in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This Brief covers the Youngest and Oldest PYS
cohorts (which had the most follow-up and most data available) from ages
10-30. It provides the most complete descriptive analyses of the
criminal careers of these males to date.
The three cohorts are commonly referred to as the Youngest, Middle, and
Oldest cohorts, respectively. Consistent with several prior publications
with the PYS data (Loeber et al., 2008), this book focuses only on data
from the Youngest and Oldest cohorts as these cohorts were followed up
the most frequently and have the longest time window of data available.
It will be of interest to researchers in Criminology and Criminal
Justice, as well as related fields like Sociology, Developmental
Psychology, Social Policy, and Education.