# Transcript

Professor John Muncie

The basis of this approach is an important study that began in the early 1960s conducted at the University of Cambridge called ‘The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development’. It’s important to contextualise this study, because a lot of our information of what the important risk factors for juvenile offending [are] comes from studies such as this. Basically it’s a longitudinal study. It started in the early 1960s with a sample of four hundred and eleven, mainly boys, who were then aged eight, selected from six primary schools in one area of London. In fact there are no girls included at that time and only twelve were from ethnic minorities, so the sample is very much a white, working-class one. Over the next forty or fifty years they were contacted nine times; and what the researchers were trying to find out is which of them have developed what they call a ‘delinquent way of life’, and why some of them had continued that delinquency beyond childhood into a life of crime into adulthood.