Abstract
The analysis of criminal career dimensions has generated a large knowledge base. Unfortunately, the lion's share of this work has been undertaken with males.
The current study seeks to build on the small (but growing) body of research on female offending patterns by examining offending trajectories in general, and chronic offending in particular, among 2450 participants from the Pittsburgh Girls Study (PGS). An important feature of our work is a comparison of both official and self-reported measures of offending.
The results indicate that there is some degree of concordance between self-reported and official offending trajectories and there is evidence of an overlap among those identified as chronic offenders from a variety of operationalizations of chronic offending.
The study limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.
•There is some concordance between self-reports and official records.•An overlap is observed for offending trajectories.•Chronic offending estimates vary by definition and data source.
