Discovering disorder: Young people and Delinquency

Introduction

This course will introduce two approaches to understanding juvenile delinquency. The psychological approach focuses on examining what makes some individuals, but not others, behave badly. The sociological approaches look at why some individuals and some behaviours, but not others, are defined as disorderly. Much of this course is based on the chapter ‘Discovering disorder: young people and delinquency’ by Catriona Havard and John Clarke (2014).

Course learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• Compare and contrast two different approaches to studying juvenile delinquency
• Understand psychological approaches to studying juvenile delinquency such as Eysenck’s personality theory and the Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development behaviour which focus on explaining why some individuals commit crimes yet others do not
• Understand sociological approaches to studying juvenile delinquency, such as those by Howard Becker, Stanley Cohen, and Stuart Hall and his colleagues, which focus on explaining why some individuals and some behaviours are labelled as deviant while others are not.