The 2012 Elliott Youth Development Lecture
Roger J. R. Levesque
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R. J. R. Levesque (&) Indiana University
, Bloomington,
USA
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use, and mental health problems. In developmental/life
course criminology studies, he has published both
empirical and review articles. In the empirical realm, for example,
he has focused on numerous topics, including
developmental pathways to serious forms of delinquency, the
contribution of family processes, biological factors, and
antecedents to homicide offending and victimization.
He is recorded as among the most frequently cited
and prolific authors in many disciplines, and his research
is truly international. He is the 74th most cited
psychologists who are members of the American
Psychological Association, a group that has approximately
150,000 members. Among criminologists, he currently is
the 11th most cited. Overall, he is the author or co-author
on almost 250 peer-reviewed papers, 12 books, and over
130 chapters. With Marc LeBlanc, he published two
seminal papers on developmental/life course criminology
in 1990 and 1998 when that field was still emerging. His
work is international in that it comprises research in
developmental/life course criminology studies in North
America and Europe. With David P. Farrington, he
cochaired in the United States three study groups, one on
serious and violent offenders, a second on child
delinquents, and a third on the transition between juvenile
offending and adult crime. Each of these study groups
was then replicated in Europe with a team of scholars of
the Netherlands and other parts of Europe, leading to
separate book-sized publications. In the Netherlands, he
held a professorship for 15 years until June 2012, when
he reached the Dutch retirement age.
In addition to being so well published in multiple
disciplines relating to criminology and developmental
sciences, he has published widely in other scholarly areas.
Notably, for example, he has published extensively in Irish
colonial history, architecture, and social and economic
history (6 books and 59 articles). His most recent book, The
Architecture of Ireland, 16002000 is in press with Yale
University Press.
Professor Loeber has a number of elected
memberships. For example, he is Senior Fellow, NSCR
(Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law
Enforcement, Amsterdam, Netherlands); Institute Fellow,
Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, England; Life Fellow, Clare Hall, University
of Cambridge, Cambridge, England; Fellow, American
Society of Criminology; and Fellow, American
Psychological Association. He also is an elected member of the
Koninklijke Academie van Wetenschappen (Royal
Academy of Sciences) in the Netherlands, and the Royal Irish
Academy in Ireland.
Professor Loebers lecture was the second in our series
(see Levesque 2011), and the resulting article breaks new
ground for the journal and journals similarly devoted to the
multidisciplinary study of adolescent development. The
first Elliott Lecture was presented by Piquero (2011), a
noted criminologist who presented his groundbreaking
work on criminal careers. That research is well represented
in this journal, particularly by Piquero and his colleagues
(see Goldweber et al. 2011). Professor Loebers topic,
which focuses on developmental aspects of killings, is
markedly new to developmental journals centered on the
multidisciplinary study of adolescence. Notably, the
journal, and its peers, increasingly publish research on violence
with weapons (Stoddard et al. 2011) as well as severe
violence (Estrada-Martnez et al. 2011), including suicidal
behaviors (Gomez et al. 2011; Jacobson et al. 2011; Verona
and Javadani 2011). But, extreme violence such as killings
remains rarely explored in developmental journals like
ours. Given that, we could not be more pleased to have
Professor Loeber present his truly cutting-edge research in
this area. Since so few researchers who study homicide so
actively have adopted a developmental framework and
have such rich data to support it, we hope that his invited
article, which addresses key developmental questions, will
increase interest in this field and the many questions it
raises. Even though Professor Loebers data remains
unmatched, and so few developmentalists focusing of the
adolescent period can parallel his efforts, his work raises
numerous theoretical, methodological, and practical issues
that continue to influence the field and serves as an
exemplar of well-conducted research with immense
societal import.
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