To Örebro University

In the current talk, a chapter from a 2014 upcoming European Hand-book of Criminal Careers and Life-course Criminology will be present-ed. The chapter is a summary of the key findings concerning criminality from a Swedish large scale prospective longitudinal research program: the IDA-program (Individual Development and Adaptation; previously named The Örebro Project). It is an ongoing longitudinal research program in which individuals have been followed from 1965, when they were at the age of 10, in a mid-sized Swedish municipality. Crime has been assessed from childhood to adulthood primarily by using official registers. The program has been listed as a key longitudinal criminological study and has thus far contributed with many original research studies on both the description and explanation of the development of criminal behavior. In this chapter, the focus is on the nature and prevalence of crime, stability of criminal behavior over developmental age-spans, early individual and social school age risk factors predicting registered criminality in general (through age 35), and criminal pathways more specifically, and the type of adulthood maladjustments associated with the different criminal path-ways, among both males and females. Results will be presented in relation to the theoretical assumptions of Moffitt’s life-course theory and Thorn-berry and Krohn’s Interactional theory. Several studies from the IDA-pro-gram are unique and have often been cited because of the holistic-inter-actionistic theoretical perspective on crime and the novel person-oriented methodological approaches to study crime, and not the least because both males and females are studied

To what extent do intellectually talented adolescents pursue educational and vocational careers that match their intellectual resources? Career outcomes were compared between groups within different IQ ranges with a focus on comparing those with high IQ (top 10%, IQ > 119) to those with average IQ. Data were analyzed from the longitudinal Swedish IDA study (N = 1,326) with career outcomes measured in midlife (age 43-47). To obtain at least a master's degree was almost 10 times more common for those of high IQ than for those of average IQ. Still, the proportion of high-IQ adolescents who did this was not high (13% of females, 34% of males) and as much as 20% of them did not even graduate from 3-year high school. For men only, there was a graded raise in income by IQ group. Within the high-IQ group there was no significant relationship between parents' socioeconomic status and income. For men, high IQ predicted a strongly increased income/vocational level in midlife beyond what was predicted from a linear model of the IQ-outcome relationship.

Some people will follow a different educational path despite having the intellectual ability to do well in school. This study explored how educational achievers and underachievers were different from each other in middle adulthood as well as examined which individual and contextual factors in adolescence were important to educational underachievement in middle adulthood. Participants are a school cohort followed from age 10 to middle adulthood (N = 1,326) and are from the Swedish longitudinal research program entitled Individual Development and Adaptation. This study focuses on a subgroup of Individual Development and Adaptation participants (n = 304) with above average intelligence (Mean IQ = 119.39, SD = 5.97). Study findings showed that a minority of adolescents in the study focal group (26%) did not complete high school, and women were more likely to educationally underachieve than men. A simultaneous multilevel logistic regression, with school class accounted for in the analysis, showed that for those of above average intelligence parents' socioeconomic status and school grades were the strongest predictors of educational attainment. Finally, in midlife, underachievers had lower incomes and occupational levels, drank less frequently, and rated their health as worse than achievers. Study implications are discussed in terms of ways to advance the field of gifted underachievement and in relation to Swedish gifted educational policy.