Turning Point Analysis
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.
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Sources
- Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2003). Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674011946
- Laub, J. H., Nagin, D. S., & Sampson, R. J. (1998). Trajectories of change in criminal offending: Good marriages and the desistance process. American Sociological Review, 63(2), 225–238. DOI: 10.2307/2657324 ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Turning Point Analysis in Criminal Careers. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/criminology/turning-point-analysis
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
- Criminal Career ParadigmCriminology↔ compare
- Desistance AnalysisCriminology↔ compare
- Life-Course Criminology AnalysisCriminology↔ compare