Social explanations of criminality

The social explanation of criminality suggests that the environment we are surrounded by makes us criminal. Family patterns, childrearing, self-fulfilling prophecy are three sub-explanations to the social explanation of criminality.

Family patterns
Divorce, separation from main caregiver, and family size could affect a person's mental state of mind and be a factor in criminality.

Divorce can lead to single parent households, some research suggests that children who come from a broken home are twice as likely to become criminal as those from an intact family. Boys can be aggressive when they have no father figure or role model. Children can be affected more negatively if there had been a lot of arguments and disruption before the divorce.

Maternal deprivation: John Bowlby linked maternal deprivation to juvenile delinquency. In 1946, John Bowlby questioned 44 boy offenders about their crimes and relationship with their mothers. He found that 14 boys felt no guilt about their crimes or victims. When he looked into their family life he found that 12 out of the 14 boys had been separated from their primary caregivers before they were 2 years old. He found that only 5 of the other 30 boys who did feel guilty were separated from their main caregivers.

Family size: Farrington (2002) found that families with a lot of children were more likely to be linked to criminality due to the lack of attention that each child can be given and the lack of parental supervision over their behaviour. Larger families are more likely to have lower income, so this offers their children less educational opportunities. This has been linked to youth offending.

In the exam you may only need to sum up these explanations in 2 or 3 sentences.

Childrearing
Childrearing strategies such as induction, love withdrawal, and power assertion have been investigated by

Self-fulfilling prophecy - Madon (2004)
Aim: To see whether a parent's expectation of their child's drinking habits would become reality

Procedure: 115 children were questioned, between 12/13 y/o, as well as their parents. Parents were asked how much alcohol they predicted that their children would consume over the coming year; 1 year later, the children were asked the actual amount.

Results: Children whose parents had predicted that they'd drink more drank more. It only took 1 parent to have a negative opinion of the child's drinking habits for the child to drink more, but people whose parents both had negative opinions seemed to be at greater risk of higher alcohol use if both parents held negative beliefs.

Conclusion: Parent's predictions of child's alcohol use are accurate. Self-fulfilling prophecy because what the parent expected came true.

Evaluation

Strength: Large sample, likely to be valid; Strong warning to parents for holding negative beliefs.

Weakness: Parents may not have influenced their child's behaviour, just accurate predictions; correlation ≠ causation; social desireability bias in which children would fill in the form to appear to be 'cooler' or 'tougher' or to conform to their parent's expectations; many other people influence children.