The book 'Character, Circumstances, and Criminal Careers: Towards a Dynamic, Developmental, and Life-Course Criminology' by Per-Olof H Wikström, Kyle Treiber and Gabriela Roman, was awarded the Division of Developmental and Life Course Criminology Outstanding Contribution Award by the American Society of Criminology, for its unique methodological and theoretical contributions to the field of criminology.
'Character, Circumstances, and Criminal Careers' brings together an original theoretical framework, a uniquely rich longitudinal dataset, and innovative analytical methods to offer and test a comprehensive explanation of why young people engage in crime and what drives their criminal careers. These questions sit at the heart of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology (DLC). Analysing 15 years of innovative and comprehensive ecological data on young people and their criminal behaviour from adolescence into young adulthood, this book provides new evidence about the causes of crime and patterns of crime over time and makes an outstanding contribution to Developmental and Life-Course Criminology.
The book presents the most fully developed statement to date of Situational Action Theory (SAT) and its Developmental Ecological Action (DEA) model, which explains criminal careers through the dynamic interaction of individual character and criminogenic circumstances across development in context. The empirical foundation of the book is the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+), one of the most methodologically sophisticated longitudinal studies in criminology. Through longitudinal analysis of its unique space-time budget data, 'Character, Circumstances, and Criminal Careers' breaks new ground in ecological developmental life-course criminology. The book explores not only diverse social contexts and their changes over time but, crucially, participants’ exposure to those contexts, and changes in their activity fields. It present innovative analyses that push the boundaries of what is empirically achievable in DLC research, especially in regard to studying person-environment interactions during social development.
'Character, Circumstances, and Criminal Careers' is a rare work that advances theory, methods, and empirical knowledge simultaneously. It makes an essential and enduring contribution to the DLC field.