Delinquency Research by Travis Hirschi Hanan C. Selvin

Author:Travis Hirschi, Hanan C. Selvin [Travis Hirschi, Hanan C. Selvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351288941
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

* * *

1This is a manufactured “quotation”; its source will become obvious shortly.

2Popper calls this the asymmetry of verifiability and falsifiability. Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books, 1959, pp. 27-48. For a fresh view of the verification-falsification controversy, see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Kuhn discusses Popper’s views on pp. 145-146. Actually, it is harder to establish noncausality than our statement suggests, because of the possibility of spurious independence. This problem is discussed in Chapter 7.

3U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Report to The Congress on Juvenile Delinquency, United States Government Printing Office, 1960, p. 21. The conclusion that poor housing is not a cause of delinquency is based on Mildred Hartsough, The Relation Between Housing and Delinquency, Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, Housing Division, 1936. The conclusion that poor physical health is not a cause is based on Edward Piper’s “unpublished Children’s Bureau manuscript summarizing the findings of numerous investigators on this subject.” Since we have not examined these two works, the following conclusions do not apply to them.

4The works cited are: for broken homes, Negley K. Teeters and John Otto Reinemann, The Challenge of Delinquency. Engle-wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1950, pp. 149-154; for poverty, Bernard Lander, Towards an Understanding of Juvenile Delinquency. New York: Columbia University Press, 1954; for recreational facilities, Ethel Shanas and Catherine E. Dunning, Recreation and Delinquency. Chicago: Chicago Recreation Commission, 1942; for race, Lander, op. cit.; for working mothers, Eleanor E. Maccoby, “Children and working mothers,” Children, 5, 1958, pp. 83-89.

5It is not clear in every case that the researcher himself reached the conclusion of noncausality or, if he did, that this conclusion was based on the false criteria discussed. Maccoby’s article, for example, contains a conjectural explanation of the relation between mother’s employment and delinquency (i.e., without presenting any statistical evidence she suggests that the original relation came about through some antecedent variable), but it appears that the conclusion of noncausality in the Report is based on other statements in her work.

6All of the foregoing criteria are related to the perfect relation criterion in that they all require variation in delinquency that is unexplained by the noncausal variable. A more general statement of criterion 3 would be: If variable X is related to delinquency when there is no variation in variable T, then variable T is not a cause of delinquency. In order for this criterion to be applicable, there must be some residual variation in delinquency after T has had its effect. Although both forms of this criterion fairly represent the reasoning involved in some claims of noncausality, and although both are false, the less explicit version in the text is superficially more plausible.

7Bernard Lander, op. cit., p. 32. (Italics in original) An alternative interpretation of the assumptions implicit in this quotation is presented in the discussion of criterion 6.

8Strictly speaking, in this quotation Lander does not demand that race be perfectly related to delinquency, but only that all Negroes be delinquents (the sufficient condition of criterion 1-b).

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