ABSTRACT
Life-course perspectives on crime can be defined as those that emphasize the examination of individuals over their lifetimes. This perspective can trace its roots to the work by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck in which they studied over a thousand young boys/men, emphasized a multifactor approach that examined almost all aspects of their development, and applied such data to predicting their delinquency and adult criminal behaviour. The most significant weakness of the life-course perspective is that it is very broad, and can likely include many hundreds of factors in both the physiological and psychological realm, as well as thousands of concepts in the sociological area. Despite its weaknesses, in recent years the life-course perspective has become one of the highest-ranked theories for explaining serious crime. Specifically, a study published in The Criminologist in 2008 showed that life-course theory ranked second in a survey of over 380 criminologists who were asked which theoretical perspective was best for explaining serious crime among adults.
