Crime and Deviance

Identify and briefly explain one advantage and one disadvantage of using overt

rather than participant observation to study crime and Deviance?

Advantages

· Researcher does not have to pretend to be .one of the gang.: this may be difficult as the researchermay lack the specialist knowledge/skills needed to play the role convincingly.

· More ethical: researcher is not compromised by having to participate in deviant or illegal acts, or by deceiving those being studied.

· Less risk of going native: by being less involved, researcher can avoid becoming over-sympathetic to deviant behaviour and producing a romanticised account of wrongdoing.

· Easier to get out at end of research: deviant groups may expect a high degree of commitment from members and may prevent them leaving, but the overt researcher was never a member and so can leave with less difficulty than a covert member.

Identify and briefly explain two ways in which knowledge of one of the following areas may help us to understand crime and deviance: families and households;health; mass media;education; wealth, poverty and welfare; work and leisure; power and politics;

Two marks for each of two appropriate ways identified from one area, such as:

· matrifocal families may fail to socialise boys appropriately, resulting in delinquency

· domestic violence

· mass media may produce .copy-cat. deviant behaviour in audiences

· teachers. negative labelling of pupils as deviant

· educational failure as a cause of crime

· religious movements may reject mainstream norms and values

· internationalisation of crime.

Disadvantages

· More difficult to gain access to deviant groups: because they are likely to be secretive and

· suspicious/untrusting of .respectable. outsiders such as sociologists.

· Researcher cannot become fully part of the deviant group: eg can.t participate in illegal activities, so can.t truly see things from their .underdog. perspective or obtain such a valid account.

· Group is more likely to conceal information: eg because members fear the negative consequences of exposure.

Two marks for each of two appropriate problems identified, such as:

· They may lack detail about the deceased that the sociologist considers important;

· Not all instances of suicide may have been recorded;

· Incorrect categorisation of cases;

· Suicide statistics are a social construct;

· The official definition of suicide may differ from that of the sociologist;

· Some states may not have collected suicide statistics.

Two marks for each of two appropriate criticisms, such as:

· It ignores non-utilitarian crime;

· It ignores collective deviance;

· It ignores law-making;

· It wrongly assumes value consensus;

· It takes official statistics for granted;

· It ignores actors. capacity to choose.

Two further marks for each of these satisfactorily explained, such as:

· Matrifocal families may fail to socialise boys appropriately, resulting in delinquency. In the absence of a father, boys lack a normative role model and turn instead to deviant ones.

· Mass media representations of deviance may produce .copy-cat. behaviour in audiences, eg by rewarding such behaviour or by repeated exposure/drip effect producing its normalisation.

· Teachers. negative labelling of pupils as deviant may produce a self-fulfilling prophecy in which pupils. behaviour becomes increasingly deviant, eg through disruption in class, truancy etc.

· Religious movements may reject mainstream norms and values and require their members to behave in ways that wider society regards as deviant or illegal, eg practising polygamy.

Advantages:

· gives insight into motivations and causes of crime;

· provides a corrective to, or more valid picture than, official statistics.

Disadvantages:

· respondents lying about offences committed;

· not all offences are included in the questions;

· correctives to official crime statistics may not be generalisable.

Two further marks for each of these satisfactorily explained, such as:

Advantages:

· Gives insight into motivations and causes of crime: self-report studies allow researchers to ask questions about motives for and attitudes to offending as well as about the offences themselves.

Disadvantages:

· Respondents lying about offences committed: eg some may exaggerate the number of offences committed so as to look .tough.; others may conceal out of shame etc.

· Not all offences are included in the questions: researchers decide what to include, and in so doing limit the number of offences the respondent can report.

Two further marks for each of these satisfactorily explained, such as:

· They may lack detail about the deceased that the sociologist considers important: eg Durkheim found that some French suicide statistics did not record the religion of the deceased, which was of importance to his hypothesis about the causes of suicide;

· Not all instances of suicide may have been recorded: eg an attempted suicide may not come to the attention of officials because the individual survives without official intervention. Other suicides may never be discovered because the body is not found;

· Incorrect categorisation of cases: eg a coroner may categorise a suicide as misadventure to spare the feelings of relatives;

· Suicide statistics are a social construct: they do not represent objective reality or the real rate of suicide, but merely the number of deaths labelled as such by social actors.

Two further marks for each of these satisfactorily explained, such as:

· It ignores non-utilitarian crime: because it sees crime as motivated only by the desire for money success, it fails to explain crimes such as vandalism, violence etc;

· It ignores collective deviance: it fails to see that some deviance is the product of subcultural norms and values, not just individuals striving to achieve societal goals;

· It ignores law-making: by focusing simply on who breaks the law, it fails to consider who makes the law and who benefits from it.