摘要：
This study was comprised of secondary analyses that utilized data from Pathways to Desistance – a seven-year, longitudinal study that gathered information from youth who initially committed serious offenses resulting in a felony charge. The primary focus of this study was to understand and identify the relationships between youths' personal characteristics, social supports, and social roles, and their intermittent offending patterns (the repeated stops and starts of deviant behavior). Although the concept of intermittent offending has been hinted at for decades, its intentional study has been quite limited. Instead, many scholars sought to examine features related to why people offended, and little attention was given to why they desisted and what was involved in this change. Since desistance has become another important facet worth studying in regard to the criminal career, its limitations are being revealed. While intermittency is argued to be part of the desistance process, its occurrence may not necessarily be an indicator that the individual is ready to desist. The study of intermittent periods between offenses might hold great promise at understanding the processes at play in leaving lives of crime as people move through time and space. Guided by life course and ecological systems theories, this study was built upon an overarching framework that situated the individual in time and place, all the while acknowledging that individuals' personal choices and encounters with others have contributed to their behaviors and circumstances. The study sought to address three aims through seven research questions. Pulling from Prochaska and DiClemente's trans-theoretical model of behavior change, Aim 1 took a descriptive approach to identify group differences in the number of intermittent periods between five events (total, aggressive, and income offending, police contacts, and being arrested and charged), and the proportion of time spent intermittent (i.e., not offending)
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