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Cohort Profile: the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study (CSYS)

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Abstract

Founded in 1935, the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study (CSYS) is a randomized controlled experiment of a delinquency prevention intervention, with an embedded prospective longitudinal survey, involving 506 underprivileged boys, ages 5 to 13 years (median = 10.5 years), from Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. The CSYS has two main objectives: to evaluate the effects of the delinquency prevention program and to investigate the development of delinquency and criminal offending over the life-course. It has been the subject of four follow-ups, with each carried out at key stages of the participants’ life-course and spanning more than 70 years: transition from adolescence to adulthood (in 1948); early adulthood (in 1956); middle age (1975–1979); and old age (2016 to present). As of the latest follow-up, 18 participants (3.6%) are missing. Data collection has been detailed and extensive, including records on the boys prior to intervention; case histories of the treatment group boys and their families during intervention; questionnaires and interviews of participants in middle age; records of delinquency, offending, and other life-course outcomes through middle age; and records of mortality through old age. The CSYS has advanced knowledge on risk factors for offending, with a particular focus on family, the complex interaction of these risk factors, the relationship between offending and mortality over the full-life course, the potential for social interventions to cause harm, and the role of deviancy training in group-directed programs. In addition, it has reinforced the need—for science and policy—for long-term follow-ups of developmental crime prevention programs.

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Notes

  1. It is important to note that Cabot had an early influence on the Gluecks’ research on criminal careers, originating in a 1925 seminar on social ethics at Harvard University that was taught by Cabot and attended by Sheldon Glueck (Laub & Sampson, 1991, p. 1407; see also Allport, 1951, p. vi).

  2. Cabot seems to have decided on the use of matching from an early stage in the planning of the CSYS, only later deciding to add random allocation because he viewed matching alone as insufficient. As reported by Powers and Witmer (1951, p. 78): “It was believed that, even if the measures used in the matching were not perfectly reliable, chance would tend to preserve, in groups as large as 325 each, an even balance of important factors.”

  3. Gottfredson (2010, p. 231, n. 2), based on an examination of data in Powers and Witmer (1951), reports the following: “although the mean differences between the treatment and control groups were small relative to their standard deviations, the direction of the differences favored the control cases on 19 of the 20 variables.”

  4. As far as we can discern, the CSYS study protocol was developed by Richard Cabot himself based on his own clinical judgment and experience. The study inception precedes any institutionalized statement of ethical principles for experiments using human subjects, such as the 1947 Nuremburg Code or 1964 Declaration of Helsinki (see Goodyear et al., 2007).

  5. Joan McCord had plans to start the study’s fourth follow-up in 1997 (52 years post-intervention), when participants were between the ages of 63 and 71 years. This information is part of the Papers of Joan McCord, which include mostly unpublished materials and are in possession of the first author. The plan is for these papers to be professionally archived and made accessible to the scholarly community and public.

  6. As McCord and her colleagues recognized, this also raised the possibility of selection bias: “One caution of [the peer-deviancy] interpretation is that youth self-selected into summer camp experiences; because their matched controls did not make a similar selection, the intervention group may be biased toward the deviance in an unknown way” (Gifford-Smith et al., 2005, p. 261).

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We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments.

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Welsh, B.C., Zane, S.N., Yohros, A. et al. Cohort Profile: the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study (CSYS). J Dev Life Course Criminology 9, 149–168 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-022-00210-1

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