MDH Flashcards
(2 cards)
Research Support
support - Bowlby offers support for the link between affectionless psychopathy and maternal deprivation and therefore offending behaviour. He conducted a natural experiment which involved analysing the case histories of 88 patients in the Child Guidance Clinic in London. 44 of the children had been accused of stealing (the ’44 thieves’) and the other 44 formed a control group of non-criminals
but emotionally disturbed young people. Bowlby found that 14 (32%) of the 44 thieves could be described as affectionless psychopaths. Of this 14, 12 (86%) had experienced prolonged separation from their mothers in the first two years of their lives, e.g. continual or repeated
stays in foster homes or hospitals, when the children were rarely visited by families. Bowlby’s
conclusion offers support for the idea that prolonged maternal deprivation causes affectionless and delinquent (offending) behaviour.
Conclusions are correlational
A criticism of Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis as an
explanation of offending behaviour, is that although Bowlby found a relationship between early separation and delinquency, we cannot definitively conclude that the separation was the cause of their offender behaviour. There may have been a third unidentified variable that accounted for the delinquency. For example, the immediate cause of the separation (such as neglect or abuse) might have been the direct cause of problems experienced at adolescence rather than the separation itself. Therefore, as the separation was not manipulated, all that is demonstrated in the study is an association between separation and delinquent behaviour
