Farrington, David P.

David Philip Farrington was born in 1944 at Ormskirk, Lancashire, England, the youngest son of William and Gladys Farrington. His father was an engineer who worked for the English army in a civilian capacity. David's early schooling was at the Ormskirk Grammar School, where he passed national scholarship exams in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, which made it possible for him to begin to study at Cambridge University in 1963. He did his undergraduate work at Clare College, where he received his BA degree in psychology in 1966 and played soccer for his college. Subsequently, he obtained his MA and his PhD in psychology and developed skills and interest in experimental psychology, [Page 458]writing a dissertation, “Continuity and Discontinuity in Human Learning.” However, Farrington found himself more interested in longitudinal studies and obtained a position in 1969 as research officer at Dr. Donald West's Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, the most important longitudinal study on delinquency in the United Kingdom, which was to influence the course of his subsequent career. While working for West at the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge, he brought to the job computer skills, a sharp analytic mind, and high energy. This work also meant a reorientation in academic interests away from experimental psychology, to criminology and methods to analyze longitudinal data. In 1974, Professor Nigel Walker created the position of assistant director of research for Farrington at the institute. Successful at his work, he was appointed university lecturer in criminology in 1976, reader in psychological criminology in 1988, and as a professor of psychological criminology in 1992, a position he currently holds.

One of the unique aspects of Farrington's career was his cementing of ties and collaborations, especially in North America, while working in Cambridge as a base. This was triggered initially by his becoming a researcher at the Ministry of the Solicitor General, Ottawa, Canada, in 1978 to 1979, and receiving a fellowship at the U.S. National Institute of Justice, Washington, D.C., in 1981. His academic contacts and work in the United States expanded, leading to an adjunct professorship of psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Pittsburgh (1998 onward) and the Jerry Lee Professorship of Criminology at the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology of the University of Maryland (1998–2002).

Currently, Farrington is one of the most cited criminologists in the world, having produced 22 books, 20 monographs, 189 papers, and 159 book chapters. Overall, his approach to science has been evidence based rather than solely theoretical, combining a profound knowledge of the literature with novel approaches to the analysis of longitudinal data. Invariably, his style of writing is concise, clear, and accessible. He has an uncanny ability to cast problems in a solvable fashion and to identify up-and-coming areas of scientific development. As a public speaker, invariably, he is able to address both scholarly and policy-oriented audiences. The variety and depth of his scholarship are resounding. Early interests focused on the follow-up of the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, for which he became primarily responsible from 1982 onward. He organized further follow-up of the participants when they were age 32 (1984–1986), while currently, in collaboration with Jeremy Coid and Temi Moffitt, he is completing their follow-up at age 46 to 48. David Farrington has been highly prolific in writing empirical articles on this study. Alongside, he wrote many seminal review and empirical papers dealing with important topics in criminology, such as the association between self-reported and official records of delinquency (1973), labeling processes (1977), longitudinal studies (1979), experimental approaches to crime (1983), personality and delinquency (1982), the relationship between age and crime (1986), the onset of offending (1990), co-offending (1991), bullying (1993), the causes of within-individual variations of behavior (2002), and offending by girls (2004). He pioneered several experiments in theft and shoplifting (1979, 1984, 1993) and advocated combined longitudinal and experimental approaches to crime (1986). In collaboration with several researchers, he instigated cross-national comparisons between delinquency in London and in England and other locations (Montreal, 1982; Stockholm, 1994; Pittsburgh, 1999; United States, 1998). Interests in statistical matters led to publications on relative improvement over chance (1989) and the effects of dichotomization of continuous data variables (2000). An intense interest in other longitudinal data led him to analyze data from Seattle (2003), Newcastle (1996), inner London (2001), and, very enduringly, the Pittsburgh Youth Study (1989 to the present). Other research focused on aspects of the juvenile justice systems, including sentencing (1983), cautioning by the police (1981), and juvenile justice practices in England and Wales (1984). Throughout his academic career, Farrington's interests have remained focused on developmental aspects of criminology but also expanded into areas such as interventions (including his leadership role in the Campbell collaboration, 2001), cost-benefit studies of interventions (2001), and a focus on serious and violent offenders (1998) and young offenders (2001). Recently, he revised and expanded his earlier theory of crime (2003).

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