Investigating developmental pathways in disruptive and delinquent behavior requires considerable detective work. The first step is identifying and assessing a broad spectrum of problem behaviors exhibited by individual children and youth. Key questions to address in the identification of developmental pathways in disruptive and delinquent behavior
include:

• Which specific disruptive and delinquent problem behaviors merit attention?

• Is there an age or age range during which each behavior is most likely to emerge?

• At what ages or for how long does each behavior remain a part of the individual's repertoire?

• Does one problem behavior cluster with other problem behaviors?

• Are there several clusters of such behavior, and are the behaviors in each cluster conceptually similar, such as aggressiveness, covertness, and
  defiance?

• Within each cluster of behavior, can behavioral problems be ranked in a continuum from less to more serious?

• Does this ranking correspond with the chronological ordering of age of onset of specific behaviors?

• Can developmental pathways for individuals be documented in such a way that the less serious conceptually similar behaviors emerge prior to more serious behaviors?

Construction of developmental pathways for boys' disruptive and delinquent behaviors did not begin with the Pittsburgh Youth Study, but rather benefited from years of research by the principal investigator, Rolf Loeber, his colleagues, and other researchers specializing in a developmental approach to child psychopathology and criminology. This Bulletin highlights Loeber's key steps in building a developmental pathways model, in which advances were incremental. By documenting the emerging behaviors of male participants in the longitudinal Pittsburgh Youth Study, Loeber has developed an extensive data base for formulating, testing, and refining his conceptual framework for male progressions into disruptive and delinquent behaviors.

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