Psychological Explanations - Differential Association Flashcards
What is differential association?
-an explanation for offending which proposes that through interaction with others, individuals learn the values, techniques and motives for offending behaviour
What is the scientific basis of differential association?
-Sutherland set himself a task of developing a set of scientific principles that could explain all types of offending
What was the key part of Sutherland’s theory?
-‘the conditions which are said to cause crime should be present when crime is present, and they should be absent when crime is absent’
What is Sutherland’s theory designed to do?
-to discriminate between individuals who become offenders and those who don’t, despite their ethnic background or social class
What is learned behaviour?
-learning occurs through interactions with other who the child values the most
-DA suggests it should be possible to predict how likely as person is to commit offences
What do you need to know in order to predict the chance of someone committing an offence?
-frequency, intensity and duration of exposure to deviant/non-deviant norms
What are the 2 factors contributing to learned behaviour?
- learning attitudes
- learning techniques
What are learning attitudes?
-exposure to values
-a number of them will be pro-criminal
-these will outweigh the anti-criminal values
What are learning techniques?
-learning particular techniques for offences
eg. how to break into a locked house
What is socialisation in prison?
-his theory can also account for why so many convicts releases from prison go on to reoffend
-whilst inside inmates will learn specific techniques from others
-this learning may occur through observational learning and imitation or direct tuition from offending peers
What is a strength of the differential association theory? - shift of focus
-first published theory that changed the focus of offending explanations
-Sutherland was successful in moving the emphasis away from early biological accounts like activistic theory
-DA draws attention to the fact that deviant social circumstances and environments may be more to blame for offending than deviant people
-more desirable approach as it offers a more realistic solution to the problem of offending instead of eugenics or punishment
What is a strength of the differential association theory? - wide reach
-can account for offending within all sectors of society
-some offences are clustered amongst more affluent groups
-Sutherland was interested rested in ‘white collar’ or corporate offences
-and how this may be a feature of middle-class social groups who share deviant norms and values
-shows that it isn’t just the ‘lower’ classes who commit offences and that the principles of DA can be used to explain all offences
What is a limitation of the differential association theory?
-difficult to test the predictions of DA
-Sutherland aimed to provide a scientific framework within which future OB could be predicted
-this menas that the predictions must be testable
-many of the concepts are not testable and cannot be operationalised
-hard to see how the number of pro-crime attitudes a person has, or has been exposed to, could be measured
-theory is built on the assumption that OB will occur when pro-crime values outnumber anti-crime ones
-without being able to measure there we cannot know at what point the urge to offend is realised
-theory doesn’t have scientific credibility
What is supporting evidence for the theory of differential association?
-Farrington
-conducted longitudinal study of devlopment of OB in 411 males who were studied from 8-50
-41% had been convicted of at least 1 offence between 10 and 50
-7% were defined as chronic offenders
-key risk factors = family criminality and poverty
-supports DA because the socialisation of males through inappropriate role models and dysfunctional systems of reward = criminal behaviour
