Exam 4: Social Structure, Process, Culture, and Delinquency

What do community-level institutions provide that has been ascertained as a key determinate of neighborhood delinquency rates?

Identify and define the critical social factors believed to cause or affect delinquent behaviors.  Of these, which do you find to be the most significant and the least significant?  Provide a rationale for your view.

What, according to Durkheim, undermines society's social control function?

What is the ability of communities to regulate the behavior of their residents through the influence of community institutions (i.e., family and school) called?

The work of Cohen aids in explaining the factors that promote and sustain a delinquent subculture in that social forces, not individual traits, promote and sustain a delinquent career.

What area or zone, according to social disorganization theory, has the heaviest concentration of delinquency rates?

Code of the streets is a view of the interrelationship of culture and behavior.  What issue, according to text, is at the heart of the code?

If you were to look for a theory that views delinquency as a result of a youth's dysfunctional or destructive relationship with the critical elements of socialization in his or her life-family, peers, schools, community-where the dysfunctionality causes the youth to see delinquency as a feasible alternative, which of the following theories should you choose? ​

Identify and describe the three variations of structural theory.  Explain which of the three variations you believe best explains the poverty-delinquency relationship.

What is the view that lower-class individuals form a separate culture within their own values and norms and that these values and norms are at times in conflict with conventional society? ​

Jack and his family moved to a new town when Jack was 14 years old.  Prior to moving, Jack and his family had lived in the same town since Jack was born and Jack never engaged in any type of delinquent acts.  When school started, Jack had only been in town for a few weeks and had not made friends.  Not really knowing anyone, Jack began hanging out with a group of kids who were into having a "good time."  These kids, Jack noticed, always seemed to have money.  They drank alcohol, sold their own or their siblings' ADHD medication, and stole from the local superstore.  Jack also noticed that they never, as far as he could tell, got caught.  If they did, they never suffered any negative consequences.  After a while Jack, too, began to engage in the same activities as his new friends.  Which of the following theories best explains Jack's behavior?

Messner and Rosenfeld presented the view of antisocial behavior as a function of cultural and institutional influences in U.S. society; this view is a macro-level version of what theory?

Merton argues that retreatists reject both the goals and the means of society.

Identify and describe the four elements of socialization that have been linked to delinquency.  If you were asked to rank order the importance of the elements, how would this look?  Provide a rationale for your view.

Alice is 16 and lives with her mother and four younger siblings in an impoverished neighborhood. Alice does well in school and will be the first of her family to graduate from high school.  She knows she could have a better life by getting a college degree, but she does not have the means to go to college and no one ever talks to Alice about furthering her education.  Like many teenage girls her age, Alice wants trendy clothes, fashionable shoes, and expensive handbags.  Alice works part-time at the local grocery store, but her earnings go to her mother to help with family finances.  Alice is approached and asked to carry drugs to the dealers around town.  She agrees; after all, she is not the one selling the drugs so she really is not hurting anyone.  The money Alice makes allows her to quit her job at the grocery store, help her mother, and buy clothes, shoes, and handbags.  She now thinks that is not necessary to finish school.  According to neutralization theory, which of the following techniques best fits Alice? ​

Residents of a community become extremely suspicious of authority, and this suspicion develops into a view in which the outside world is the enemy out to destroy the neighborhood.  What is this view called?

What psychological reaction occurs when a person does or says something that is the opposite of what he or she really wants to or what is socially expected and appropriate. ​

An inner-city playground is covered in graffiti, the playground equipment is broken, and there are known drug dealers who traverse the playground; these factors suggest that community conditions contribute to the high delinquency rate found in the area.

According to GST, child abuse and neglect, school failure, family and/or peer conflicts, racism, and discrimination are experiences associated with what source of strain?

Social theories have guided policy making since the 1960s; for instance, learning theories have influenced the way criminal offenders are dealt with and treated.