NCJ Number
74105
Journal
Criminology Volume: 18 Issue: 3 Dated: (November 1980) Pages: 303-318
Date Published
1980
Length
16 pages
Annotation
The results of this study show that delinquent behavior, measured by serious or status offenses, social or hard drug use, is not predictable from social status, regardless of the larger class context of schools.
Abstract
Two hypotheses were investigated: first, that the higher the social status of the school (as defined by the class background of the majority of its students), the lower the rate of deviant behavior; and second that within schools with predominantly working-class students, the commission of delinquent behavior is inversely related to students' social status. The data were generated from a self-report questionnaire administered to 1725 male and female students of nine junior high schools and six high schools in three school districts located in two midwestern states. Represented were a large urban center, an affluent subcommunity located just outside the larger urban area. The data pertained to individual social status measured mostly by the father's occupation along eight categories of the United States census occupational scale; aggregate school status, estimated by examining the distribution of student's social status within each school (upper-middle, working-class, and middle-class schools) and by deviance, i.e. frequency of use of social drugs (alcohol and marihuana), hard drugs (stimulants, depressants, psychedelics, and narcotics), and serious delinquent behavior (vandalism, motor vehicle theft, and larceny theft). Little support was found for either hypothesis. For example, of the 144 pairwise comparisons for the four deviance-scale scores in nine junior high schools, only 11 were statistically significant, and of these, only 4 involved working-class schools with higher rates of deviance than middle-class schools. Thus, the hypothesis that overall rates of deviance vary inversely by school status could not be supported. Furthermore, even though overall, it appeared that lower-status adolescents slightly more deviant acts than do middle-class and upper-middle status adolescents, the sizes of the observed relationships were too small for substantive significance. However, urban areas larger that those in this study may intensify status differences and thus produce significant relationships between social class and delinquent behavior. Statistical data, notes, and references are included.