Many scholars and citizens argue that we must look to individual differences as much as to social environments in order to understand the origins of social problems, including problems of the street. For example, Baum and Burnes (1993) maintain that problems such as homelessness and crime share common causes that have as much to do with the characteristics of the people involved as with the structural circumstances and social experiences they encounter. Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) similarly suggest that a range of disvalued behaviors, from adolescents running away from home to adults engaging in force and fraud, have common origins in lapses of self-control.

The background and developmental differences that these theorists emphasize often are understood as deficiencies that derive from parentage and parenting. The psychological literature on human development encourages this orientation, suggesting that such deficiencies can lead individuals to congregate in particular environments. From this psychological or developmental perspective, problems of homelessness and crime are seen as more ontogenetic than sociogenic – that is, as being more internally than externally driven, arising more from individual differences than from variation in the social environments in which people develop (see Dannefer, 1984; Caspi et al., 1994).

Alternatively, sociologists and social psychologists who study the life course tend to focus on social structures, roles, and socialization processes. This tradition of research is inclined to view socially structured experiences as formative environments in which individual differences emerge and change, especially in the transition from adolescence to adulthood (Elder, 1975). In this and following chapters, we increasingly incorporate a life course perspective in our attention to foreground experiences of youth living on the streets.