Modern criminological theories aim to explain crime, but they do so with a different emphasis on pathways to crime and ranges of explanatory factors (e.g., Thornberry & Krohn, 2002; Farrington, 2005; Wikström, 2005). Theoretical explanations of serious delinquency and violence are sometimes met with consistent empirical findings, and sometimes with equivocal results. On the one hand, meta-analyses indicate a high degree of replication of bivariate associations between explanatory/risk factors and later serious delinquency (e.g., Lipsey & Derzon, 1998; Howell, 2003). On the other hand, results from multivariate analyses based on multiple predictors vary greatly from study to study (Thornberry, 1997; Thornberry & Krohn, 2002; Farrington, 2005). This is partly caused by studies selecting relatively few of the known explanatory/risk factors of serious delinquency and under-emphasizing other factors. Although theories of antisocial and delinquent behavior often have several factors in common (e.g., juveniles' relationships with parents and peers), they differ in their relative emphasis on domains, settings, and details of explanatory factors, and the ways that these factors are interrelated (see above sources and chapters in Lahey, Moffitt, & Caspi, 2003 and in Farrington, 2005).
The theories almost always share three themes with the goals of explaining (i) antisocial and delinquent behavior over the life course, particularly in terms of prevalence, frequency, and severity of delinquent acts, (ii) individual differences in antisocial/delinquent behavior and developmental changes in these differences, and (iii) non-offending or low-level offending.