The field of life course and developmental criminology has advanced our knowledge with research on several topics, including age of onset, persistence and continuity, desistance, trajectories of delinquency and crime, correlates of delinquency and crime at different ages and stages of the life course, and correlates of these phenomena, but it has not done extensive, full theory tests of theories for different stages of the life course. The present study tests anomie/strain theory for adult crime and compares the results to previous results for anomie theory in adolescence and early adulthood using longitudinal data on a national probability sample that follows respondents from early adolescence to middle adulthood. Although anomie theory appears to have originally been a theory intended to explain adult crime, the findings indicate that it does better at explaining middle adolescent and young adult illicit substance use and other criminal or delinquent behaviors. These results suggest that testing full theories, not just individual hypotheses about correlates, may improve our understanding of the evolving etiology of illegal behavior over the life course.

生命历程和发展犯罪学领域通过对几个主题的研究提高了我们的知识，包括发病年龄、持续性和连续性、停止、犯罪和犯罪的轨迹、犯罪和犯罪在生命历程不同年龄和阶段的相关性、和这些现象的相关性，但它没有对生命过程不同阶段的理论进行广泛的、完整的理论检验。本研究测试了成人犯罪的失范/应变理论，并将结果与​​青春期和成年早期失范理论的先前结果进行比较，使用国家概率样本的纵向数据，该样本跟踪受访者从青春期早期到成年中期。尽管失范理论最初似乎是一种旨在解释成人犯罪的理论，研究结果表明，它在解释中青年和青年非法药物使用和其他犯罪或违法行为方面做得更好。这些结果表明，测试完整的理论，而不仅仅是关于相关性的个人假设，可能会提高我们对生命过程中非法行为不断演变的病因的理解。