On the Number and Pattern of Developmental Trajectories of Delinquency Among Korean Male Adolescents: Testing the Generalizability of Agnew’s General Theory of Crime and Delinquency.

This study took a person-centered approach to delinquency trajectories to identify unobserved heterogeneity among Korean male adolescents. A series of latent class growth analyses were fit to five-wave panel data from the Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey – from the sixth grade of elementary school through grade 10 of high school. Three trajectory classes were obtained from the data: <italic>Early-onset and decreasing</italic> (4.3%); <italic>late peak</italic> (4.6%); and <italic>rare offender</italic> (91.1%). The conditional application of the group-based models included self-domains, motivations, and constrains variables as time-specific predictors within the framework of Agnew’s (2005) general theory of crime and delinquency. The overall findings revealed that the link between life domains and class membership was fully mediated by motivations and constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]