ABSTRACT
The seriousness of each person's most serious offense determined the group into which he/she was placed. Thus, there were armed robbers in the all-around street offender group who had committed numerous property offenses as well, followed by varied assaulters who had committed assault offenses but not robbery, and so on. The various typologies which arranged cohort members according to their most frequent offenses or most serious offenses revealed that there was considerable heterogeneity within types and that a large proportion of those who fell into the more serious types also had police contacts for drug offenses. The question is whether computer-constructed typologies represent careers better than do simple additive scores such as the number of offenses or referrals or the number of offenses of each type by their weighted seriousness. When the self-report offense seriousness types for the 1942 and 1949 Cohorts were substituted for official types, there was even less relationship between the juvenile and adult periods.
