ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on studies predicting delinquency during the adolescent years, although some of the studies carry over into the adult years. The measures of prior behavior found in delinquency prediction research are more accurately viewed as indicators of previously learned behavior patterns than as indicators of high or low self-control. Delinquency prediction studies, from the earliest to the most recent, have had to confront methodological and theoretical issues that are not yet resolved. Those prediction studies beginning in the pre-adolescent years have found that rule breaking and deviant behavior in childhood, even in fairly early childhood, is predictive of delinquency in adolescence. Both in the behavioral-interactive sense of associating with those who behave similarly and in the normative sense of exposure to definitions favorable or unfavorable to delinquency, peer associations are, of course, a central part of the differential association process in social learning.
