[lbo-talk] They lived in the next street from me

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Thu Jul 14 11:35:33 PDT 2005


Kelley:
> sounds like Durkheim:
>
> http://durkheim.itgo.com/suicide.html
>
> (although I thought researchers have generally tossed this one out?)
>

Not really - this is based on studies of delinquency by Shaw and McKay, Hirshi, and Katz with plenty of empirical support - more than any other theory of delinquency. The problem with Durkheim is that he had good ideas but applied them too broadly, to all aspects of social life, which set him for a certain failure because he had more variables than cases, so to speak. Narrowing the scope down to delinquency and social groups rather than societies helped to solve that problem. It is a while since I TA'd criminology in grad school, but what I remember is that the social control theory (Hirshi) seems to have the strongest empirical support.

Wojtek



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