Gary Sweeten

• Arizona State University

Objectives This study aims to examine whether periods of marijuana and other illicit drug dealing (“spells” of dealing) are associated with changes in young male offenders’ gun carrying behavior. Methods This paper uses 84 months of data from a sample of 479 serious juvenile male offenders who were assessed every 6 months for 3 years and then annu...

Objective This study examines the effects of dynamic risk factors on handgun carrying from adolescence into young adulthood. Method A nationally representative sample of 8,679 individuals (ages 12–26; 51.1% male; 58% White, 26.8% African American; 21.2% Hispanic ethnicity) from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997 cohort) interviewed at...

Although studies have identified risk factors for adolescent handgun carrying, previous research on risk factors for carrying a handgun to school specifically is sparse. This study examines self-report data from 122,840 8th, 10th, and 12th grade students from 426 schools across Arizona, from three survey administrations (2014, 2016, and 2018). In e...

Purpose The desistance literature identifies many competing explanations for desistance. Equifinality, Cicchetti and Rogosch (Dev Psychopathol 8:597–600, 1996), refers to the idea that a diversity of pathways can lead to the same end result. Embracing this perspective, we shift our focus from identifying effects of causes to identifying the causes...

Although the strongest evidence in prevention science comes from well-designed and faithfully implemented randomized control trials, sometimes randomization is not feasible and sometimes randomized control trials do not unfold as planned. This chapter reviews standards of evidence in prevention science, discusses how research can fall short of thes...

The Boston Special Youth Project (SYP) Affiliation dataset is a large, bipartite network representing interactions among 166 gang members from seven gangs for nearly three years. The project was conducted from June 1954 to May 1957 and represents one of the most elaborate gang intervention programs ever conducted. The SYP was a “detached-worker pro...

Aim: We estimate group-based dating violence trajectories and identify the adolescent risk factors that explain membership in each trajectory group. Method: Using longitudinal data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, which follows a sample of 1354 serious juvenile offenders from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Phoenix, Arizona between mid-adol...

The decline and delay of marriage has prolonged adolescence and the transition to adulthood, and consequently fostered greater romantic relationship fluidity during a stage of the life course that is pivotal for both development and offending. Yet, despite a growing literature of the consequences of romantic relationships breakup, little is known a...

This study determined the frequency, prevalence, and turnover in gang membership between ages 5 and 17 years in the United States. Data were from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, which is representative of youth born between 1980 and 1984. Age-specific patterns of gang joining, participation, and leaving are estimated based on youths...

Objective: The study of gang members is closely linked to the self-nomination method. It is timely to revisit the criterion validity of self-nomination, as recent theoretical and empirical advancements in gang disengagement necessitate further differentiating current from former gang members. This study assessed differences in gang embeddedness—a c...

This study assesses self-control theory’s (Gottfredson & Hirschi 1990) stability postulate. We advance research on self-control stability in three ways. First, we extend the study of stability beyond high school, estimating group-based trajectory models (GBTM) of self-reports of self-control from age 10 to 25. Second, drawing in part on advances in...

SynonymsGroup-based trajectory modeling; Latent class growth modeling; Latent trajectory modeling; Semi-parametric group-based methodOverviewGroup-based trajectory modeling is a powerful and versatile tool that has been extensively used to study crime over the life course. The method was part of a methodological response to the criminal careers deb...

Objectives. Drawing from social network and life-course frameworks, the authors extend Hagan’s concept of criminal embeddedness to embeddedness within gangs. This study explores the relationship between embeddedness in a gang, a type of deviant network, and desistance from gang membership. Method. Data were gathered over a five-year period from 2...

We study the relationship between disengagement from gangs and desistance from crime within a life-course criminological framework. Gang disengagement is conceptualized as the event of gang membership de-identification and the process of declining gang embeddedness. We examine the effects of both the event and the process of disengaging from gangs...

Objectives. Drawing from social network and life-course frameworks, the authors extend Hagan’s concept of criminal embeddedness to embeddedness within gangs. This study explores the relationship between embeddedness in a gang, a type of deviant network, and desistance from gang membership. Method. Data were gathered over a five-year period from 226...

Age is one of the most robust correlates of criminal behavior. Yet, explanations for this relationship are varied and conflicting. Developmental theories point to a multitude of sociological, psychological, and biological changes that occur during adolescence and adulthood. One prominent criminological perspective outlined by Gottfredson and Hirsch...

Recent studies have directed attention to the nature of romantic involvement and its implications for offending over the life course. How-ever, this body of research has overlooked a defining aspect of nonmarital romantic relationships: Most come to an end. By drawing on insights from general strain theory, the age-graded theory of informal social...

Objective: This paper reviews a century of research on creating theoretically meaningful and empirically useful scales of criminal offending and illustrates their strengths and weaknesses. Methods: The history of scaling criminal offending is traced in a detailed literature review focusing on the issues of seriousness, unidimensionality, frequency...

The propensity score methodology has become quite common in applied research in the last 10 years, and criminology is no exception to this growing trend. It offers a potentially powerful way to estimate the treatment effect of some intervention on behavior when the receipt of treatment arises in a nonrandom way – this is the selection problem. It d...

The research findings with respect to the relationship between incarceration and employment are consistent enough that it is tempting to conclude that incarceration causes deterioration in ex-inmates' employment prospects. Yet, causality remains tenuous for several reasons. For one, studies frequently rely on samples of nonincarcerated subjects tha...

Much of the knowledge base on offense specialization indicates that, although there is some (short-term) specialization, it exists amidst much versatility in offending. Yet this general conclusion is drawn on studies using very different conceptualizations of specialization and emerges with data primarily through the first two to three decades of l...

Abstract: Criminal career researchers and developmental criminologists have identified describing individual trajectories of offending over time as a key research question. In response, recently various statistical methods have been developed and used to describe individual offending patterns over the life-course. Two approaches that are prominent...

Approximately one third of U.S. high-school freshmen do not earn their high-school diploma on time. For African-American and Hispanic students, this figure nearly reaches one half. The long-term economic consequences of dropping out of school for both the student and the larger community have been well documented. It has also been argued that schoo...

On the basis of prior research findings that employed youth, and especially intensively employed youth, have higher rates of delinquent behavior and lower academic achievement, scholars have called for limits on the maximum number of hours per week that teenagers are allowed to work. We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to assess t...

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We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to obtain estimates of the number of crimes avoided through incapacitation of individual offenders. Incarcerated individuals are matched to comparable non-incarcerated counterparts using propensity score matching. Propensity scores for incarceration are calculated using a wide variety of time-st...

Little research has assessed the effects of juvenile justice involvement during high school on educational outcomes. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this study assesses the effect of first-time arrest and court involve-ment during high school on educational attainment. In addition, differential effects by structural location a...

Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) has been a mainstay of the social sciences for empirically examining hypothesized relationships, and the main approach for establishing the importance of empirical results. NHST is the foundation of classical or frequentist statistics. The approach is designed to test the probability of generating the obs...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.