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This chapter discusses the current theoretical models that have been developed to explain criminal offending during the transition years between adolescence and adulthood. The chapter first identifies the key aspects of offending that typify the transition years, including desistance from delinquency, persistence in offending from adolescence to adulthood, and late onset offending. The chapter then reviews how major theories of delinquency and crime attempt to explain these divergent patterns of offending. In particular, it discusses static or population heterogeneity models, dynamic or state dependence models, social psychological theories, the developmental psychopathology perspective, and, finally, biopsychosocial theory. In each case the chapter discusses the theory’s assumptions and core propositions with a particular focus on propositions concerning offending during early adulthood. The chapter also reviews the empirical literature that has tested each of these theories. Although there are is considerable overlap across these different theoretical perspectives, each offers a unique perspective about how the transition from adolescence to adulthood influences offending and how, in turn, offending influences the timing and success of the transition to adulthood. It closes by discussing policy implications of these different theoretical orientations.

This chapter explores the link between past and subsequent criminal activity (another robust finding in criminology). The strong positive association between past and subsequent criminal offending is one of the most agreed, yet least well understood facts about law breaking behavior. Individuals who have offended in the past are most likely to offend in the future. There is little doubt or ambiguity about the validity of this claim. Still, it is not clear why this association exists. In other words, the fact that there is a positive association between criminal offending at two (or more) points in time is really not in question; what is at issue, however, is the aetiological significance of this association. There are three broad aetiological expositions that assert unique alternative explanations for this recurrently documented positive association: population heterogeneity, state dependence, and mixed theories of crime. This chapter examines whether there are any state dependence effects within the three California parole release samples of what can only be described as ‘very high-risk’ juvenile offenders.

This chapter discusses the general population heterogeneity, state dependence, and ‘mixed’ explanations of criminal behaviour. Three specific theoretical perspectives are considered: Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) self-control theory of crime, Sampson and Laub's (1993) age-graded theory of informal social control, and Moffitt's dual taxonomy theory (1993). The focus is on how each theoretical perspective accounts for the processes of continuity and discontinuity in criminal offending patterns, the relationship between age and crime, and the relationship between past and subsequent criminal activity. The age-crime curve is also examined.

The tremendous expansion of population research over the last 50 years has proceeded on many levels, from genes and microorganisms to national and global entities. Elementary procedures of population definition are crucial because they shape possible lines of inquiry: the kinds of phenomena that can be recognized, how they are explored, varying research outcomes, and applications to human problems. Conventional statistical procedures, in specifying parameters at the outset of inquiry, are inappropriate when research objectives are to identify unknown relationships and discover parameters that may capture them. Central problems of population heterogeneity—the configuration of alleles in gene expression, the dynamics of species subgroups, the many shifting subgroups in national populations—thus require new, more open, methodologies. Developments in evolutionary biology and compositional demography reviewed here suggest that, while research functions on many levels, a common ground of problems and approaches is emerging in many parts of the human sciences.

One of the most promising conceptual and empirical breakthroughs to emerge from combined anthropological and demographic thinking is the theory of conjunctural action. Developed in a sequence of articles and books by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, this approach provides an effective alternative to rationalist decision-making models that have prevailed in population studies over the whole post-War period. Observation and analysis of vital conjunctures show how social, economic, and political differences between groups in society are manifested in individual agency at specific points across the life course, and how people’s behaviour in this way differentiates the many subpopulations making up a society. The approach thus addresses directly two major shortcomings in population research: the need to explain mechanisms underlying the evolution of population heterogeneity, and the dynamics that entrench inequalities. To date, the study of conjunctural action has been addressed chiefly to fertility. In this chapter, we explore how health issues facing older people, their families, and communities are illuminated by this approach, drawing on multi-site, longitudinal ethnographic and demographic research in Indonesia. We begin with the nature of uncertainty and vulnerability at older ages, and how it can be modelled across the life course. This leads to consideration of the dynamic relation between individual action and subpopulation memberships, and how it articulates the compositional demography of status, network, ethnic, and related subpopulation memberships.

Demographic research on Asian populations has focused on movements which are more or less permanent displacements from one area to another, but the reality of contemporary mobility involves significant circularity, reciprocity, and exchange, and is often temporary. Both internal and international migration have become significant components of population and social change and economic development. This is demonstrated with respect to international mobility by examining patterns linking Australia with several Asian countries, the unusual completeness of Australian and some historical Indonesian migration data revealing the heterogeneity of demographic behaviour. A comparative framework for migration research, based on a continuum of forms of movement, with multiple criteria differentiating them, is outlined. Documenting heterogeneity is critical not only for understanding, but for policy and programme interventions. The chapter notes a number of opportunities in Asia to expand demographic research on migration, and makes specific suggestions regarding how we can better investigate its heterogeneity.

This chapter outlines a general typology of public health interventions, illustrated by the history of programmes for native American Indian populations. Three types of intervention are noted: definitive procedures, like immunization, which do not entail ongoing behavioural change; population-based procedures that can be applied uniformly across all individuals, and clinical interventions that focus on high-risk individuals. These strategies reflect top-down population approaches and comprehensive monitoring to assess impacts. In contrast to definitive procedures are halfway technologies and approaches, where health problems can be ameliorated but not fully resolved and characteristically involve significant changes of behaviour. For American Indian populations, as with much of the world, conditions requiring halfway approaches—diabetes, heart disease, cancers—have become much more prevalent. Halfway interventions pose significant problems for conventional statistics and closed population models, because they entail continuing social evolution, which does not fit easily into datasets composed of discrete classifications and unrepeatable events.

This chapter presents a reconstruction of mortality, nuptiality, and fertility dynamics in the Lower Yangzi Valley from the early nineteenth to the second quarter of the twentieth century. Principal data are compilations of ‘faithful widows’ constructed for the Qing dynasty, and other genealogical sources. This substantial body of information requires interpretation in terms of distinctive forms of marriage, differential survivorship of kin categories, contemporary events, and health conditions. Pre-modern life tables show that in the countryside of the Lower Yangzi Valley, the traditional pattern of age-specific mortality hardly changed before the Japanese invasion of 1937. The pattern is also shown to be true for nuptiality and for the variable annual fertility during the years of maximum childbearing. Significant demographic variations between local regions are revealed, though far more in mortality and fertility than in nuptiality. The assumptions and logic of inference needed in reconstructing these populations are discussed in detail.