Compare methods

	Turning Point Analysis	Desistance Analysis
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Regression model
Year of origin	1998	2001
Originator	John H. Laub, Daniel S. Nagin & Robert J. Sampson	John H. Laub & Robert J. Sampson; Shawn D. Bushway et al.
Type	Within-individual analysis of life events that redirect offending trajectories	Time-to-event and trajectory modeling of ceasing offending
Seminal source	Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2003). Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674011946	Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2001). Understanding desistance from crime. Crime and Justice, 28, 1–69.
Aliases	Life-Event Turning Point Analysis, Turning Points in Offending, Life-Transition Analysis of Crime, Redirection-of-Trajectory Analysis	Desistance Modeling, Time-to-Desistance Analysis, Cessation-of-Offending Analysis, Criminal Career Termination Analysis
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.	Desistance analysis models the process by which offenders cease offending — estimating the timing of the last offense, the hazard of termination, and the decline of offending toward zero. Sharpened by Laub and Sampson and by Bushway and colleagues around 2001, it treats desistance not as a single event but as a process, and confronts the deep measurement problem of telling true termination apart from a long gap or a gradual slowing of crime.