ABSTRACT
Hirschi and Gottfredson concluded in their 1983 article on Age and Crime (in Chapter 9 following) that an invariant age distribution of crime would make longitudinal research unnecessary, and this idea appears again and again in their writings. A companion piece to this article is Hirschi's review essay of Explaining Delinquency and Drug Use by Delbert Elliott, David Huizinga, and Suzanne S. Ageton ( Criminology 25, 1987:193-201), where some of the principles discussed here are applied to an ongoing longitudinal research project. At the time Gottfredson and Hirschi wrote, several large-scale longitudinal studies were in progress or just getting underway. It seems fair to say that by now we should have a better sense of the accuracy of their predictions about the costs and benefits of such efforts. If the answer is that we now need more and better longitudinal research, which sometimes seem to be the case, it would appear that Gottfredson and Hirschi were onto something!—JHL/TH
