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	Criminal Career Paradigm	Self-Report Delinquency Scale
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1986	1980
Originator	Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, Jeffrey Roth & Christy Visher	Delbert S. Elliott & Suzanne S. Ageton
Type	Conceptual framework for decomposing offending over the life course	Self-report behavioral measurement instrument
Seminal source	Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., Roth, J. A., & Visher, C. A. (Eds.). (1986). Criminal Careers and 'Career Criminals' (Vols. 1–2). National Academy Press. ISBN: 9780309036887	Elliott, D. S., & Ageton, S. S. (1980). Reconciling race and class differences in self-reported and official estimates of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 45(1), 95–110.
Aliases	Criminal Careers Framework, Career Criminal Paradigm, Offending Career Approach, Blumstein Criminal Career Model	SRD Scale, Self-Reported Delinquency Measure, Self-Report Offending Inventory, National Youth Survey Delinquency Scale
Related	4	4
Summary	The criminal career paradigm is a framework for studying offending as a longitudinal sequence in an individual's life rather than as undifferentiated aggregate crime. Codified by Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, and Visher in the 1986 National Academy of Sciences report, it decomposes crime into distinct dimensions — whether someone offends (participation), how often active offenders offend (frequency, λ), and the onset, seriousness, and duration of the career — each potentially with different causes.	A self-report delinquency (SRD) scale measures offending by asking respondents directly how often they have committed specific delinquent or criminal acts, rather than relying on arrests or convictions. The modern frequency-based approach was established by Delbert Elliott and Suzanne Ageton in 1980 for the National Youth Survey, designed to capture the full range and frequency of offending and to overcome the biases of official crime records.