Although an extensive literature has accumulated documenting the maladaptive outcomes associated with childhood victimization, a limited body of knowledge addresses resilience. This paper sought to operationalize the construct of resilience across a number of domains of functioning and time periods and to determine the extent to which abused and neglected children grown up demonstrate resilience. Substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect from 1967 to 1971 were matched on gender, age, race, and approximate family social class with nonabused and nonneglected children and followed prospectively into young adulthood. Between 1989 and 1995, 1,196 participants (676 abused and neglected and 520 controls) were administered a 2-hr in-person interview, including a psychiatric assessment. Resilience requires meeting the criteria for success across six of eight domains of functioning: employment, homelessness, education, social activity, psychiatric disorder, substance abuse, and two domains assessing criminal behavior (official arrest and self-reports of violence). Results indicate that 22% of abused and neglected individuals meet the criteria for resilience. More females met the criteria for resilience and females were successful across a greater number of domains than males. We speculate on the meaning of these findings and discuss implications for the child maltreatment field. Limitations of the study are also acknowledged.

The life‐course approach to criminal career research has devoted a good deal of attention to the generality or specialization of offending behavior. Typically, extant research demonstrates versatility on the part of offenders, yet such findings could be attributable, at least in part, to time and measurement aggregation bias. This work uses a temporally disaggregated and individualized measure of diversity in offending to determine whether the previous findings of generality hold up to shifts in methodology. Using data from a sample of serious felons, results indicated that the magnitude of specialization is greater than in prior studies. Regression results indicated that certain demographic and local life‐circumstance variables are related to the extent of diversity. Theoretical and methodological implications are identified and discussed.

Research has consistently indicated that most offenders demonstrate diversity over the life course. Even so, recent work suggests that offenders tend to illustrate specialization in the short-term, though this specialization diminishes as the “time window” for examining an offending career increases. To examine why this pattern emerges, the authors investigate the extent to which opportunity structures, as defined by local life circumstances, predict offense specialization/diversity relative to individuals' enduring propensities to offend. The results suggest that both individual-level propensity, as well as changes in local life circumstances (e.g., employment, marriage, drug and alcohol use), impact patterns of offense specialization/ versatility in the short term. The implications of these results for life-course theories of crime, with a particular focus on integrating opportunity and propensity models of criminal behavior, are discussed.

From learning and opportunity perspectives, peer group structural dimensions shed light on social processes that can amplify or ameliorate the risk of having delinquent friends. Previous research has not accounted for a primary criminological variable, self-control, limiting theoretical clarity. The authors developed three hypotheses about self-control's potential role in deviant peer structure: it may underlie and explain the (spurious) relationship between deviant peers or peer structure and delinquency, be partially exogenous to deviant peers and deviant peer structure, and moderate the effects of deviant peers and deviant peer structure. To test these hypotheses, the authors used data from a longitudinal sample of adolescents containing peer self-reports of delinquency. The results suggest that self-control and deviant peers are complementary. This is the first study demonstrating this relationship with self-reports of deviance rather than perceptions. Less support was found for the conditioning impact of deviant network structure than in previous work. Some differential patterns also emerged by gender and race. Implications of these findings are discussed.