DISENTANGLING THE LINK BETWEEN DISRUPTED FAMILIES AND DELINQUENCY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development is a prospective longitudinal survey of 411 South London males from age 8 to age 46. Delinquency rates were higher among 75 boys who were living in permanently disrupted families on their fifteenth birthday, compared to boys living in intact families. Results were very similar whether juvenile convictions, juvenile self-reported delinquency or adult convictions were studied. Delinquency rates were similar in disrupted families and in intact high conflict families. Boys who lost their mothers were more likely to be delinquent than boys who lost their fathers, and disruptions caused by parental disharmony were more damaging than disruptions caused by parental death. Boys from disrupted families who continued living with their mothers had similar delinquency rates to boys from intact harmonious families. These results are more concordant with life course theories rather than with trauma theories or selection theories of the effects of family disruption. Broken Homes and Delinquency Fuelled by the increasing instability of marital relationships since the 1960s, which has led to ever-increasing proportions of children experiencing disruption of their family life, the last three decades have witnessed a massive increase in research into the effect of parental separation and divorce on children. Within criminology, ‘the topic of broken homes has been a central part of delinquency theory since the emergence of criminology in the 19th century’ (Wells and Rankin 1991: 71). Rising juvenile crime rates coinciding with this increase in family instability provided an added impetus to carry out research into the link between disrupted families and delinquency. In this paper, we will discuss some of the complexities involved in analysing the association, and review explanations put forward to account for it. We will then test these explanations using data collected in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, which is a prospective longitudinal study of 411 South London males from age 8 to age 46. Early research up to the 1960s (e.g. Douglas et al. 1968; Glueck and Glueck 1950) revealed a considerably higher incidence of family disruption among delinquents convicted of criminal offences than among the non-delinquent population. American research from the 1950s suggested that a large part of the relation might reflect differential treatment by the police and courts (Wilkinson 1974); arguably, because two-parent homes were thought to be better able to provide supervision, youths from such homes were less often brought to court than were those from disrupted families. Nye’s (1958) study of high school students in Washington State, for example, revealed that the relationship between broken homes and delinquency was much reduced using self-reports. An
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".