Chapters 4-6 Flashcards
A self-report survey conducted at a single point in time. This kind of research design provides a glimpse of the data of the population at a particular time.
Cross-sectional survey
A self-report survey that gathers information from the same individuals at more than one point in time. This is superior to a pinpoint in time to address questions of causal order and change.
Longitudinal survey
The extent to which repeated measurements of a variable produce the same or similar responses over time.
Reliability
Provides “official data” on crime and delinquency, voluntarily reported by over 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States, and compiled by the FBI. These data reveal the extent of crime and delinquency with which the reporting agencies deal, and the characteristics of offenses and offenders they encounter.
Uniform Crime Reporting program
The degree to which a measurement instrument measures what it is supposed to measure.
Validity
The bell-shaped curve observed when one graphs the relationship between age and crime. This curve typically shows an increase in delinquent involvement during the teenage years, a peak in mid-adolescence to early adulthood, and then a rapid decline.
Age–crime curve
The disproportionate involvement of young people in crime
Age effect
The average number of delinquent offenses committed by adolescents in general or by delinquent youth.
Incidence
The proportion of youth involved in delinquent acts
Prevalence
In comparison to each other, the types of delinquent offenses that occur most often.
Relative frequency
Social characteristics (such as age, gender, race, and social class) that are statistically related to involvement in delinquency and that tend to distinguish offenders from non-offenders.
Social correlates
Argue that crime and delinquency rates are high when the cultural goal of economic success is emphasized more strongly than the institutionalized means of achieving that goal. Merton (1938) used the term to describe the societal condition of normlessness that results when societal goals are stressed to a much greater degree than are the institutionalized means for achieving those goals.
Anomie theories
An interdisciplinary approach that views delinquency and other forms of antisocial behavior as resulting from a combination of biological, psychological, and social causes.
Biosocial criminology
A combination of cohesion among community residents and their willingness to exert informal social control. This theory argues that the influence of neighborhood structural characteristics on rates of crime and violence depends on the degree to which local residents are interdependent, cohesive, and willing to exercise informal control.
Collective efficacy
Isolate and categorize features of the world that are thought to be causally important. Different theories of delinquency incorporate and emphasize different versions.
Concepts
Argues that the development of problem behaviors tends to occur in an orderly, progressive way that is highly age-determined. Examines the patterning of offending in terms of five elements: age of onset of problem behaviors, continuity and change in problem behaviors, progression of seriousness, generality of deviance, and desistance from offending.
Developmental perspective
Argues that criminal behavior is learned through social interaction in groups. Through such interaction, individuals learn both techniques for committing delinquent acts and definitions favorable to offending.
Differential association theory
Examines social bonds over the life course, considering their origins and how changes in these bonds influence informal social control and behavior.
Life-course theory
Theoretical statements that tell how concepts are related.
Propositions
Focuses on perceptions of risk and reward related to delinquency and argues that a series of offending decisions are made over time, involving a variety of individual, social, and legal factors that are sometimes specific to particular types of crime.
Rational choice theory
Argues that the likelihood of participating in delinquency depends on the degree to which the daily routines of everyday life provide situational opportunity for crime.
Routine activities theory
Contends that individuals that possess a certain trait are impulsive, insensitive risk takers who are less able than others to resist the temptations of crime and analogous acts such as reckless driving, smoking, and alcohol and drug use.
Self-control theory
Contends that individuals conform in order to maintain relationship bonds and avoid disappointing others and are free to engage in delinquent acts when their bond to society is weak or broken. This theory argues that four elements provide a reason to conform: Attachment, commitment to conventional lines of action, involvement in conventional activities, and belief in the moral validity of law.
Social bond theory
Emphasize informal social controls that social relationships, especially within the family, provide to control behavior.
Social control theories
