David P. Farrington's research while affiliated with University of Cambridge and other places
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Publications (923)
Research has established a relationship between trauma exposure, often conceptualized as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and offending, with some evidence suggesting that both trauma and offending can be transmitted from one generation to the next. Further, while some evidence suggests that experiencing a high number of ACEs is associated wit...
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to compare self-reported antisocial (SRA) behaviour of 10-year-old boys in China (in Zhuhai) and the USA (in Pittsburgh).
Design/methodology/approach
In Pittsburgh, 868 boys were given a SRA behaviour questionnaire in 1987–1988. In Zhuhai, 1,154 boys were given the same questionnaire in 2017.
Findings
The prev...
This article aims to identify interactions between harsh discipline and poor supervision and other childhood risk factors (all measured at age 8-10) in predicting delinquency. It analyzes data collected in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD), which is a prospective longitudinal study of 411 London males first assessed at age 8. Of...
Other than official data, self-report data is the second-most utilized source for information on offending. Recognizing the inherent limitations of official and self-report data in terms of sources for crime measurement, this chapter provides an in-depth exploration into the prevalence and frequency of offending among the CSDD males with a specific...
Life-course research has benefited recently from the development and application of advanced statistical methods, most notably group-based trajectory modeling (GBTM). These methods have allowed life-course researchers to assess taxonomies of offending and identify distinct offender trajectories. Guided by this methodological framework, this chapter...
This chapter lists the references for the 120 publications from the CSDD in 2013–2023. The key findings are summarized in Chap. 6.
The main aim of this chapter is to summarize recent results of the CSDD from 2013 to 2023, based on analyses of the G2 males. Brief summaries of some of the main findings can be found in Farrington (The Cambridge study in delinquent development. In: Eaves D, Webster CD, Haque Q, Eaves-Thalken J (eds) Risk rules: a practical guide to structured prof...
Official criminal records are one of the most well-known sources of crime data. Accordingly, this chapter reviews the process whereby the criminal record searches were conducted in order to construct the life-course conviction records among the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) males from ages 10 to 61. This rich offending informatio...
The study of criminal careers has been the focus of a long line of research dating back to the early nineteenth century. Despite this rich history, it is only more recently that life-course research has begun efforts to unpack the complexity of criminal career dimensions. This approach has yielded important research findings with relevant policy im...
The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) represents one of the longest and most comprehensive prospective longitudinal studies in the world focusing on offending, risk factors, and life events. This chapter, based on the corresponding chapter in the previous edition (Farrington DP, Piquero, AR, Jennings WG, Offending from childhood to l...
Research using citation counts as a metric for measuring scholarly influence and prestige generally gives equal weighting to all authors of a scholarly work. However, as the order of authors frequently reflects the relative importance and involvement of authors, it may be more valid to consider this issue when examining citations. This article focu...
Antisocial Potential is the key construct of the Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential (ICAP) theory, and it has been measured by the antisocial attitude (AA) scale. The ICAP theory is one of the main theoretical frameworks in developmental and life-course criminology. The present study aimed to examine the psychometric properties of the AA sca...
Using an experimental design and a multi-measure and multi-informant approach, the current study sought to evaluate the impact of the early developmental prevention program "ZARPAR"-an intervention designed as a social and cognitive skills training program, that seeks to promote children's behavioral adjustment. A sample of elementary school childr...
The present study describes the processes of change that are associated with individual transformations that lead youth offenders in Argentina to move away from a criminal life and reintegrate into the community. The narratives of 128 young offenders aged 16, who were monitored during the follow-up period of 2 years established by the criminal law...
Antisocial behavior is a worldwide problem that negatively affects individuals and societies, and it is influenced by contextual factors. The study of how antisocial behavior changes through time frames and among countries provides information of the extent to which the environment influences this problem, which could help to develop more accurate...
Risk factors are central to the understanding and prediction of psychopathology. The current study focuses on risk factors for psychopathic personality and psychopathic behaviour by investigating the following: (1) Early risk factors for later psychopathic personality and psychopathic behaviour in men and women, and (2) Independently predictive ris...
Background:
Criminal justice policy decisions are increasingly being influenced by the ratio of the monetary benefits to the monetary costs. While policies based on evidence and analysed via cost-benefit studies are a welcome development, cost-benefit calculations are only as robust as the data upon which they are based. For England and Wales up t...
Purpose
This paper aims to present new evidence from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) showing the extent to which obstetric (e.g. abnormal birth weight, confinement at birth, severe abnormality of pregnancy, etc.) and early childhood and family factors (illegitimate child, unwanted conception, family overcrowding, etc.) have pre...
Background:
Children and youth who are at risk of becoming early-onset life-course-persistent offenders often slip through the cracks of other systems in society (e.g., health, education, child welfare, substance use and mental health). When they do, they impose an enormous economic burden on society. Developmental crime prevention (DCP) programme...
This book has identified the most-cited scholars in major criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) journals over a 35-year period, as well as the most-cited works of the most-cited scholars. Our analyses have tracked the most-cited scholars in four international CCJ journals, six American journals, and 20 American and international journals. These an...
This chapter provides an introduction to the book. In this chapter, we review the advantages of citation analysis as a measure of scholarly impact and prestige, as well as briefly discussing productivity analysis, a subsidiary form of citation analysis. We also give a brief overview of the main sources of citation data and explain why we chose to u...
This chapter focuses on our third stream of research, which examines a total of 20 journals published in the year 2020, including five American criminology journals, five American criminal justice journals, five international criminology journals, and five international criminal justice journals. We begin by presenting key 2020 statistics for the 2...
Purpose
This paper aims to advance knowledge about the life course of impulsive males from childhood to adulthood, based on data collected in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) from age 8 to 65 and to investigate which factors are related to impulsiveness at different ages.
Design/methodology/approach
The CSDD is a prospective lo...
This chapter focuses on our second stream of research, which examines six major American journals. The study includes three criminology journals (Criminology; the Journal of Quantitative Criminology; and the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency) as well as three criminal justice journals (Justice Quarterly, the Journal of Criminal Justice,...
This chapter describes the methodology that we have used in our citation analysis research. We go into detail regarding the main sources of citation data, including the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar, and review the limitations of each, before emphasizing our decision to examine reference lists of journal articles. The selection of the...
This chapter focuses on our first stream of research, which examines a major criminology and criminal justice journal in the United States as well as one from each of the major English-speaking countries around the world (Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom). The four journals are the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Crim...
Longitudinal investigations of associations between health and offending are rare. Studies which have investigated
this relationship principally focus on mental health within samples of incarcerated offenders. This article
provides a review of the current evidence base on health and offending, focusing on criminological theories
seeking to explain...
In this chapter, we present a summary of the significant discoveries outlined in this book, organised into three main themes: (1) the prevalence and co-occurrence of emotional and behavioural problems (EBPs); (2) the relationship between EBPs, drug use, and re-offending; and (3) the risk and protective factors associated with EBPs. These findings a...
The main aim of this article is to summarize the best available evidence (from systematic reviews) of the eff ectiveness of 12 types of interventions in reducing juvenile off ending and antisocial behaviour. In the interests of making the results widely understandable to researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and the general public, all eff ect...
Objectives
Current knowledge about the causes of offending behavior is heavily reliant on self-reports of offending (SRO). However, methodological research on the impact of modes of administration on SRO is very scarce. Further, the existing evidence conflicts with the general knowledge about responding to sensitive questions. In this study, we aim...
Current knowledge about the development of offending behavior is largely reliant on information derived from longitudinal research. However, the longitudinal design may influence the quality of self-report measures. There is some evidence in the literature suggesting that participants’ reports of offending behavior decrease as a function of the num...
Objectives
Field experiments combine the benefits of the experimental method and the study of human behavior in real-life settings, providing high internal and external validity. This article aims to review the field experimental evidence on the causes of offending.Methods
We carried out a systematic search for field experiments studying stealing o...
Studies suggest that the greatest health risks among people going through the criminal justice system occur in the community rather than during incarceration (Spaulding et al., 2011). Unfortunately, the health of offenders outside prisons, such as individuals on community orders or suspended sentence orders, has not received the same degree of atte...
Using cross-lagged model design, the present study is the first one to longitudinally examine whether bidirectional associations between child psychopathy features and negative parenting behaviors remain when controlling for parental psychopathic traits. The relationship between parental and child psychopathology, child conduct problems and parenta...
Most criminological theories are not truly scientific, since they do not yield exact quantitative predictions of criminal career features, such as the prevalence and frequency of offending at different ages. This Element aims to make progress towards more scientific criminological theories. A simple theory is described, based on measures of the pro...
Meta-analyses have provided major findings about developmental predictors of offending. However, there has been little focus on their relative ability to predict offending behaviour. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review of meta-analyses with two aims: 1) to summarize all well-established knowledge about developmental (explanatory) predictors...
The main aim of this article is to assess the most cited scholars in five international journals in three time periods: 2006–2010, 2011–2015, and 2016–2020. The five international journals are the Asian Journal of Criminology (AJC), the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology (ANZ), the British Journal of Criminology (BJC), the Canadian J...
Although research on sensitive topics has produced a large body of knowledge on how to improve the quality of self-reported data, little is known regarding the sensitivity of offending questions, and much less is known regarding how topic sensitivity is affected by recall periods. In this study, we developed a multi-dimensional assessment of item s...
The current investigation asseses the relationship between DSM personality disorders (PDs) and PCL psychopathy in a community study: the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD). The children (Generation 3) of the original CSDD males (Generation 2) were assessed for PDs and psychopathy in early adulthood. Generation 3 consisted of both male...
To date, no theory of bullying in residential care for youth has been proposed. By drawing on the results of the existing research on bullying and peer violence in youth residential care and adapting the Multifactor Model of Bullying in Secure Settings (MMBSS), this paper proposes the first integrative theory of bullying in residential care—the Mul...
Background
The long-term mental and physical health consequences of childhood maltreatment have been well documented. Less known are the longer-term consequences of childhood maltreatment, specifically the extent to which childhood maltreatment predicts adult life success.
Objectives
To prospectively assess the extent to which childhood experience...
The Basic Empathy Scale is widely used to measure cognitive and affective empathy in different age groups. Although empathy is studied throughout the world, research on this important psychological construct in Eastern European populations needs to be increased. In order to accomplish this, validated instruments to measure empathy are needed in thi...
Research Summary
This article reports on an updated systematic review and meta‐analysis of the effects of street lighting interventions on crime in public places. Following Campbell Collaboration guidelines, it uses robust criteria for inclusion of studies, comprehensive search strategies to identify eligible studies, a detailed protocol for coding...
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Objectives
To provide a detailed understanding of how the prevalence and frequency of offending vary with age in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) and to quantify the influence of early childhood risk factors such as high troublesomeness on this variation.
Methods
We develop a statistical model for the prevalence and frequency o...
Antisocial behavior and somatization are common problems in schools that have several consequences. However, the relation among these problems is not clear. This longitudinal research aims to better understand whether antisocial behavior is related to and predicts somatization, in order to prevent and reduce both disorders in young people. A longit...
Background
While some studies have reported that early age of onset of cannabis and amphetamine use predicts a range of adverse outcomes, these findings are rarely adjusted for other predictors of adverse outcomes or subsequent drug use over the adult life course. These studies have not addressed the possibility that it is subsequent rather than ea...
Background:
Cooperative learning and Project-Based Learning are methodologies that can promote learning environments and improve learning, school achievement, and social and emotional competencies.
Method:
A mixed combination of these two methodologies called Cooperative Project-Based Learning was designed, and a quasi-experimental evaluation st...
Intergenerational continuities in criminal behaviour have been well documented, but it is not known whether this extends to the experience of imprisonment. Using data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, this chapter will examine the prevalence of instances of imprisonment in two generations of the study to establish whether there is...
This chapter takes a developmental and life-course perspective on psychopathy and criminal behavior; Fox, Jennings, and Farrington (2015) argued that psychopathy should be understood within the framework of developmental and life-course (DLC) criminology and its theories. The chapter reviews major prospective longitudinal studies that have addresse...
Research suggests that convicted persons are more likely than non-convicted persons to suffer poor health. However, few longitudinal studies have investigated associations between health and offending across generations. Using the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, this article prospectively investigates the relationship between health and...
Background
Familial influences on the development of many psychopathologies are well recognised, yet the psychosocial risk factors that could help explain apparently intergenerational continuities of personality disorder (PD) are less well understood.
Aims
To establish whether there is an association between the severity of PD in men and their off...
Abstract
This article analyses risk factors for criminal recidivism of young offenders in Argentina, compared with studies in other
countries; 65 recidivists are compared with 59 one-time offenders. Effect sizes were calculated for 24 risk factors for recidivism.
Seven groups of risk factors were compared: (a) demographic information, (b) offence h...
Studies show that different types of antisocial behaviors share similar risk and protective factors related to particular social, emotional and moral competencies. Nevertheless, little is known about the longitudinal relation of social, emotional and moral competencies with patterns of antisocial behaviors in youth. The present study aimed to disco...
To further understand psychopathy within a Developmental and Life-Course Criminology perspective, the current article investigates the stability and change in psychopathy from childhood to middle age. The Cambridge Study in delinquent development is a prospective longitudinal study of 411 males, where psychopathy was coded based on contemporanously...
Background:
Antisocial behaviours make social interactions difficult among students. Moral emotions, online empathy, and anger management are social and emotional variables related to prosocial and antisocial behaviours and health problems. This research aims to assess the impact of Cooperative Project-Based Learning intervention on these three va...
This paper presents an assessment of the existing literature on validity and methodology relevant to crime prevention studies. Reports eligible for inclusion in the review focused on assessing the methodological quality of crime prevention evaluations. A narrative synthesis approach was used to review the included reports to examine how validity co...
Low empathy is an important psychological construct for understanding persistent criminal and antisocial behavior. In this study the affective empathy (the capacity to experience the emotions of others) and cogni-tive empathy (the capacity to understand the emotions of others) of 100 young male offenders (aged 16-17) in Buenos Aires was assessed us...
Ed Latessa’s career was devoted to using evidence-based interventions to improve the lives of offenders. This article honors Ed by contributing to this line of inquiry. The main aim is to review criminological experiments with offending outcomes and a follow-up period of at least 10 years. Twenty major experiments are summarized, with intervention...
Prior research shows that convicted and incarcerated persons tend to die early, but this research does not investigate the relationships between criminal career features and early death. The aim of this article is to utilize the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development longitudinal sample of males to study this; 54 males who died early (up to age...
The Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS) started data collection in 1987, with three age cohorts of inner-city boys from the Pittsburgh Public School system. The youngest cohort (N = 503), the middle cohort (N = 508), and the oldest cohort (N = 506) were assessed first every 6 months, and later annually. Information was collected from participants, their p...
The main aim of this article is to assess the most-cited scholars in 20 criminology and criminal justice journals in 2015 and to compare them with the most-cited scholars in these journals in 1990–2010 and with the most-cited scholars in the Asian Journal of Criminology (AJC) in 2015. Five American criminology journals, five American criminal justi...
The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) was begun by Professor Donald West in 1961 and has been intermittently funded by the Home Office and the Department of Health. The main focus was on continuity or discontinuity in behavioral development, on the effects of life events on development, and on predicting future behavior. The most imp...
This is the first Italian study to examine views on sexbots of adult male sex offenders and non-offenders, and their perceptions of sexbots as sexual partners, and sexbots as a means to prevent sexual violence. In order to explore these aspects 344 adult males were involved in the study. The study carried out two types of comparisons. 100 male sex...
This study investigates intergenerational relationships between the father’s personality disorder (PD) traits and the PD traits of his male and female offspring. We examine whether the intergenerational transmission of PD is due to the father transmitting a general vulnerability to all PDs, or whether the transmission is more specific to particular...
This study compares childhood explanatory factors for adolescent offending according to official records obtained in three longitudinal projects conducted in three different countries: the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, the Pittsburgh Youth Study, and the Zurich Project on the Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood. This is the...
This study shows longitudinal predictors of involvement in different bullying roles, including mental health, individual, family, peer and school predictors. The analyses were based on a longitudinal prospective study with 916 students followed up from ages 7 to 17 with 7 waves of data. Participants were selected through random sampling and were en...
Dog-training programs have become a popular form of alternative prison programming. One of the reported benefits of these programs is their low cost to the criminal justice system. Very little research has been conducted on their effects on offenders, and, to date, no cost-benefit analyses have been reported. This article presents a cost-benefit an...
Purpose
Previous research has indicated that low resting heart rate (RHR), measured at age 18, predicts later psychopathy, and that high RHR acts as a protective factor in nullifying the influence of several psychosocial risk factors in predicting later antisocial and criminal outcomes. This paper aims to investigate high RHR as a protective factor...
Background: Previous research has suggested that people with a history of offending have worse health compared to non‐offenders, but it is less clear whether all types of offenders are at similar health risks. In a New Zealand birth cohort study, Moffitt evidenced three main offending trajectories—life‐course‐persistent (LCP), adolescence-limited (...
The present study aims to test the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version of the “How I Think” (HIT) questionnaire. The HIT questionnaire is a self-report measure of self-serving cognitive distortions. Our sample was comprised of 442 Portuguese-speaking adolescents and young adults (254 males and 188 females), aged between 12 and 20 year...
Purpose
The purpose of the current study is to investigate to what extent, and when, psychopathic personality is predictive of violent convictions.
Methods
By analyzing data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, the relationships between psychopathic personality, childhood risk factors, and violent convictions were investigated prosp...
Executive Summary/Abstract
Background
Bullying first emerged as an important topic of research in the 1980s in Norway (Olweus), and a recent meta‐analysis shows that these forms of aggression remain prevalent among young people globally (Modecki et al.). Prominent researchers in the field have defined bullying as any aggressive behavior that incor...
Psychopathy has been an important topic of study in psychology and increasingly in criminology. The adverse, antisocial behavior of psychopaths has been studied for quite some time, yet there remains less work on how psychopaths may (or may not) succeed in other life domains, including in particular employment. On this score, the literature provide...
Previous research has shown that many school-based anti-bullying programs are effective. A prior meta-analysis (Gaffney, Ttofi, & Farrington, 2019) found that intervention programs are effective in reducing school-bullying perpetration by approximately 19–20% and school-bullying victimization by approximately 15–16%. Using data from this prior meta...
The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) is a prospective longitudinal study of 411 London males who were first assessed in 1961–1962 at age 8–9. The main aim of the CSDD is to study the development of offending and antisocial behaviour from childhood to adulthood. The males have been interviewed nine times from age 8 to age 48, and the...
Research indicates that individuals with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are more likely to offend, and that some ACEs, such as offending and child maltreatment, are transmitted from one generation to the next. However, the extent to which ACEs are transferred across generations and its subsequent impact on offending has not been examined. Usi...
A consolidated list of offender motivations for criminal offending was created to determine the relevance of individual motivations for youth and adult crimes, and across a range of offending categories. Adult male inmates (N= 136) rated the relevance of each of 17 motivations to official conviction records and other clinical-risk measures. Results...
In the last two decades, closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras have come to occupy a central role in contemporary crime prevention across the world. Widely viewed as the “internationalization” of CCTV surveillance, there has been a corresponding growth in the evidence base about its effect on crime. The cumulative evidence demonstra...
Purpose
This paper describes the origins and application of a theory, the social development model (SDM), that seeks to explain causal processes that lead to the development of prosocial and problem behaviors. The SDM was used to guide the development of a multicomponent intervention in middle childhood called Raising Healthy Children (RHC) that se...
Purpose
The Early Assessment Risk Lists for Boys (EARL-20B) and Girls (EARL-21G) measure risk for future antisocial behaviour in conduct-disordered children aged 6–11. Their aim is to assist clinicians in targeting these factors so that evidence-based, age-graded responses to antisocial behaviour can be provided to prevent children from entering th...
This book describes the lives of 12 people born in Europe and North America during the Second World War. They became leading scholars on the development and prevention of violent human behavior. From the first to the last page, the book introduces contrasting life-stories and shows how their paths crossed to create a relatively unified body of know...
