The 44 Thieves Study - Bowlby (1946)

OVERVIEW:

• One of the most famous studies of all time, carried out by Bowlby in 1946.
• He was interested to know if there might be any long term emotional and cognitive damage to a child, caused by being deprived of an attachment with its mother when attachments were in the process of being formed.
• Obvious difficulties are finding an approppriate sample of children.  Experiment not ethical and observations not technically possible in this era so Bowlby had to use a sample where children were naturally separated from their parents which meant they had to be in some for of institution.  He used children from a Child Guidance Clinic.

AIM:

• To see if maternal deprivation may be a significant factor in delinquency.

METHOD:

• Bowlby interviewd 44 adolescents who were referred to a child protection programme in London following convictions of thieving.
• Another 44 non-thieving children were the control group.  These children had emotional problems but were not criminals.
• He also interviewed parents to discover whether there had been any absence of the maternal figure at any time during their lives.

RESULTS:

• Over half the juvenile thieves had been separated from their mothers for longer than 6 months during their first 5 years.
• In the control group, only 2 had had such a separation.
• 32% of juvenile thieves showed a lack of remorse, were unfeeling and dispassionate which Bowlby went on to call affectionless psychopathy.
• None of the control group showed this characteristic.

CONCLUSION:

• Juvenile thieves had become delinquent due to maternal deprivation and that not only did this result in criminal behaviour but also affected the development of their personality and ability to form appropriate social relationships.

EVALUATION:

• Retrospective stufy means there is a danger that information provided is inaccurate.  People tend to remember negative events from their past and embellish them more than positive events.  Studies in memory have shown us how inaccurate memory recall can be!
• Experimenter bias cannot be ruled out since Bowlby carried out the interviews himself and may have inadvertently drawn conclusions or highlighted information that was not considered as important for participants.
• Despite the use of a control group and an experimental group this is NOT an experiment but  a correlational study therefore we CANNOT deduce that maternal deprivation caused either delinquency or the affectionless psychopathy, only that there appears to be a link.

• If just over half of juvenile thieves had experienced separation from their mother in the first 5 years, that means just under half did not, yet still went onto thieve.  Results are by no means conclusive!
• Whilst differences between the 2 groups were found, it cannot be said they were down to solely maternal attachments.  Each of the children would have been bought up in different homes, in different communities, have different numbers of siblings, have different educational backgrounds, different social experiences.
• However this study serves as a starting point, indicating that there is a possibility that at least some children deprived of an attachment figure in early life may have difficulty fitting into the community at a later date.