Compare methods

	Turning Point Analysis	Criminal Career Paradigm
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1998	1986
Originator	John H. Laub, Daniel S. Nagin & Robert J. Sampson	Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, Jeffrey Roth & Christy Visher
Type	Within-individual analysis of life events that redirect offending trajectories	Conceptual framework for decomposing offending over the life course
Seminal source	Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2003). Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674011946	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
Aliases	Life-Event Turning Point Analysis, Turning Points in Offending, Life-Transition Analysis of Crime, Redirection-of-Trajectory Analysis	Criminal Careers Framework, Career Criminal Paradigm, Offending Career Approach, Blumstein Criminal Career Model
Related	3	4
Summary	Turning point analysis examines how specific life events — marriage, stable employment, military service, parenthood — redirect an individual's offending trajectory. Developed within Sampson and Laub's life-course program, it uses within-individual and counterfactual designs to ask whether the same person offends less after a transition than before, isolating the causal imprint of life events from the stable traits that select people into them.	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.