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11 - From Childhood in a Ruined German City to Research on Crime and Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2021

By
Friedrich Lösel
Edited by
Richard E. Tremblay
Richard E. Tremblay
Affiliation:
Université de Montréal
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Summary

Friedrich Lösel was born in Germany in 1945. He is Emeritus Professor at Cambridge University (UK), as well as Erlangen University and Berlin Psychological University in Germany. He received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, the Sellin-Glueck Award from the American Society of Criminology, and the Joan McCord Award from the Academy of Experimental Criminology. He created the Erlangen–Nuremberg Development and Prevention Study (ENDPS), which combined a prospective longitudinal and experimental design and investigated more than 600 children and their families from kindergarten to adolescence. The ENDPS showed that accumulated individual and social risk factors at preschool age predicted behavior problems in youth, but there was also developmental flexibility. The prevention part of the ENDPS implemented a universal training of child social skills, a parent training on positive parenting, and a combination of both. There were substantial short-term effects and promising outcomes after 10 years. The ENDPS team trained about 2,000 facilitators for a nationwide dissemination of the program. He also carried out an important longitudinal study on school bullying showing that intensive bullying perpetration was not only a school phenomenon but correlated with violence in other contexts and with criminal behavior in adulthood.

Keywords

longitudinal studiesexperimental studiesviolence preventiondevelopmental flexibilitydisseminationbullyingbehavioral problemssocial skills trainingparent trainingcriminal behavior
Type
Chapter
Information
The Science of Violent Behavior Development and Prevention
Contributions of the Second World War Generation
 , pp. 271 - 298
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

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