In recent years, there have been various attempts, with mixed results, to examine whether sports and leisure activities for young people have an effect on youthful offending. Drawing on the authors’ experience of sport related programs, interventions are categorized using a combination of Brantingham and Faust’s (1976) categorization of programs in terms of three types of crime reduction potential: primary, secondary, and tertiary and a categorization of three types of mechanisms of crime reduction: diversion, deterrence, and pro-social development. These assist in producing a typology of crime reduction mechanisms. It was seen that the impact of some types of intervention is not only inherently more difficult to measure, but also demands far more resources to do so. The main purpose of the article is to show that different methods of evaluation are appropriate and practical, depending on the program’s position in the typology. The implication of the categorization is that it can inform the selection of research methods in a deductive approach, starting research from theory. In addition, categorization can inform the design of programs. References