p with research strategies and methods of interpretation that can have the good effect of allowing experts to reliably predict or identify cause and effect rather than research that simply reports statistics about what ôvariablesö can be connected to delinquency. Schwartz, Rendon, and Hsieh explain the major methods of research into juvenile crime, dividing the principal research methods into decades. In so doing, they provide a glimpse into popular imagination about adolescents of the respective periods, and essentially chart a persistent nature-versus-nurture debate about the origins of violent or antisocial behavior.
For example, they note that during the 1960s the focus was on minor juvenile offenses such as truancy, which was said to be a kind of behavior that could lead to adult crime. By the 1970s, the focus had shifted not so much to behavior as to somatic or psychological causes of juveni
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