International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology Adversity and Verbal IQ Predicting Offending The Contribution of Family Adversity and Verbal IQ to Criminal Behavior Chris L. Gibson Alex R. Piquero Stephen G. Tibbetts Abstract: Several scholars have employed the risk factor prevention paradigm in identifying risk factors and protective factors that increase and decrease the odds of offending. Farrington suggested that multiplicative interactions of such factors should be explored in an attempt to understand how they are linked to differential offending behaviors such as offending preva- lence and early onset of offending. The authors examine Moffitt’s interactional hypothesis that states that two specific risk factors, verbal IQ and family adversity, interact to increase the probability of particular types of criminal behavior. Using data from the Philadelphia portion of the Collaborative Perinatal Project of 987 African American youth, logistic regression anal- yses indicate that the combined effect of verbal IQ and family adversity did not significantly increase the odds of becoming an offender, whereas the combined effect of low verbal IQ scores at age 7 and family adversity significantly increased the odds of early onset of offending. Since the early 1990s, there has been a progressive effort to identify risk and pro- tective factors that contribute to increasing and decreasing the odds of differential offending behavior (e.g., early onset of offending, violent offending, etc.). Farrington (2000) referred to this model as the risk factor prevention paradigm. Although recently introduced to the field of criminology by scholars such as Hawkins and Catalano (1992) and Farrington (2000), the risk factor prevention paradigm has been widely applied in the fields of public health and medicine to successfully address and prevent life-threatening illnesses such as cancer and heart conditions. As it pertains to criminology, this paradigm is simple in that its goal is to identify the important risk and protective factors of offending behaviors and then, based on the identification of such factors, implement prevention tech- niques designed to minimize the risk factors and maximize the protective factors. As noted by Farrington (2000), this relatively new and simple approach has been advocated and adopted in the United States (Loeber & Farrington, 1998) and expanded to several industrialized countries such as the United Kingdom (Nutall, Goldblatt, & Lewis, 1998) and the Netherlands (Junger-Tas, 1997). NOTE: All correspondence regarding this article should be sent to Alex R. Piquero, University of Florida, Center for Studies in Criminology and Law, PO Box 115950, 201 Walker Hall, Gainesville, Florida 32611-5950; e-mail: apiquero@crim.ufl.edu. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 45(5), 2001 574-592  2001 Sage Publications 574