Psychological Explanations: Differential Association Theory (SLT) Flashcards
How does differential association theory suggest people learn offending behaviour through?
Association and interaction with different people.
Who developed differential association theory?
Sutherland.
What did Sutherland develop?
A set of scientific principles that could explain all types of offending.
What is Sutherland’s theory designed to do?
Discriminate between individuals who become offenders and those who don’t whatever their social class or ethnic background.
How might offending behaviour be acquired?
The same way as other behaviour - the process of learning which occurs through interactions with significant others who the child values and spends most of their time with e.g. family and peer groups.
What does differential association suggest?
That it should be possible to mathematically predict how likely an individual is ti commit an offence by knowing the frequency, intensity and duration of exposure to deviant and non-deviant norms and values.
What does offending arise from?
Learned attitudes towards offending and learning of specific offending acts/ techniques.
What is learning attitudes?
When a person is socialised into a group they become exposed to values and attitudes towards the law, some pro-crime some anti-crime.
Sutherland argues that if the number of pro-crime attitudes the person acquires outweighs the number of anti-crime attitudes the person will go on to offend.
What are learning techniques?
The would-be offender may also learn particular techniques for committing offences.
What else can Sutherland’s theory account for?
Why so many convicts released from prison go on to reoffend.
How might offenders in prison learn techniques for committing offences?
Through observational learning and imitation or direct tuition from offending peers.
Evaluation: Differential association theory changed the focus of offending explanations.
Sutherland’s was successful in moving the emphasis away from early biological accounts of offending e.g. Lombrosos atavistic characteristics. DAS draws attention to the facts that deviant social circumstances and environments might be to blame for offending than deviant people. Therefore this approach is more desirable as it offers a more realistic solution to offending than eugenics.
Evaluation: DAS has a risk of stereotyping
Although Sutherland took great care to point out that offending behaviour should be considered on a case by case basis the theory tends suggest that exposure to pro-crime values is sufficient to produce offending in those who are exposed to it which ignores the fact that people may choose not to offend despise influences as not everyone who is exposed to pro-crime attitudes foes on to offend.
Evaluation: can account within all sectors of society.
Sutherland recognised some types of offences e.g. burglary may be clustered within certain inner-city, working-class communities its also the case that some offences are clustered amongst more affluent groups in society such as ‘white collar’ crime. This shows that it’s not just ‘lower’ classes who commit crime and that principled of DAS can be used to explain all offences.
Evaluation: Difficult to test predictions of DA.
Many concepts aren’t testable because they cant be operationalised e.g. it’s hard to see how the number of pro-crime attitudes has or has been exposed to could be measured. Similarly this theory is based on the assumption that offending behaviour will occur when pro-crime values outnumber anti-crime ones however without being able to measure these we cant know at what point the urge to offend is realised and the offending career triggered there this theory doesn’t have scientific credibility.
