Social Change and Crime. A Multi-Cohort Study on Crime and the Life-Course

In the proposed project we intend to investigate the development of crime and changes with respect to its risk factors, structure and distribution. The project will use a multi-cohort approach, which means that a number of birth cohorts are followed over time. The oldest birth cohort will consist of those born in 1975 and the youngest of those born in 2005.

This sums up to 31 cohorts who grew up during different time periods and were thereby subject to partly different sociohistorical conditions.

We plan to utilize administrative register data and the multi-cohort approach to analyse changes in the distribution of crime and individual life trajectories, with a particular focus on intra and inter-cohort differences. We do this by comparing individuals at the same age in different historical periods as they grow up.

The overarching research question concerns how cohort membership, i.e. the historical period during which a cohort grew up, are linked to processes of debut, persistence and desistance in crime over the life course and how this interacts with factors at the individual, family and neighbourhood levels.

The exploration of the links between birth cohort membership, socio-geographical context and criminal career parameters has implications for both criminological theory and policy.The project will run for four years and is a collaboration between the Department of Criminology and the Department of Human Geography, both at Stockholm University.