This is an ideologically charged area of debate that is further complicated by the frequent failure of scientific efforts that use self-report surveys of adolescents to find substantial associations between parental status and delinquency. This chapter argues, however, that when appropriate class measures of unemployment are used both among individuals and at higher levels of aggregation, consistent relationships are found. It is important to distinguish the various levels of analysis at which research on class and crime is done, because the causal relationships that are observed differ by level, and it is fallacious to use research from one level of analysis to reason about processes of causation at another level. The use of research from a higher macro-level of research, such as neighborhoods, to discuss micro-level behaviors of individuals is called the ecological fallacy. The reverse error is called the individualistic fallacy. This chapter illustrates the problems such fallacies can produce in observing that although unemployment causes crime at the neighborhood level, crime more immediately and directly causes unemployment at the micro-level of individual adolescents. These patterns are connected, in that macro-level community unemployment can create micro-level conditions for individuals in which juvenile delinquency is likely to lead to adult unemployment and associated crime. The discussion illustrates two conditions that are commonly required to assert that causation occurs: an association between the distinctly defined phenomena of interest and an established logical or temporal direction to the associated flow of causation. When these conditions are established, attention usually turns to a consideration of how other factors may influence the relationship that has been observed.