Untitled Flashcards Set
Conceptions of Deviance
- Objectively given: Generally agreed upon set of norms on conduct and behaviour
- Subjectively problematic: Deviance is co-constructed by society, becoming deviant when society creates them.
o Not inherently deviant
- Critical conception: Those in power create deviant conceptions to enhance power or control
R. v. Butler
- Video store owner and had adult section of porn
- Argued under section 2. b, freedom of expression that protects those videos as a form of expression
- Lower court agreed with this defense
- Police needed to check if it was non-consensual or depicting violence
- Only 8 videos deemed to have been not consensual or dxepicting violence or cruelty
- Court of appeal said the materials were not protected as they exploited human sexuality
- SCC ruled the criminal code indeed violated section 2. B of the charter, but protected under section 1
*Think about defining deviance and how it can change (what if this happened in 2025?)
Sociological Imagination (Mills)
- The social forces that engage and react to deviance.
o Understanding larger sociological perspective is important, as deviance may not be a personal problem but a systematic one.
o We tend to focus too much on the individual problems
Folkways
- Customs we follow but not written
Taboos
- ‘Negative norms’, things that people find offensive and socially inappropriate
Mores
- Moral norms
Laws
- Norms that are defined as legal or illegal
Normative, Relativist, Positivist, and Critical perspectives
- Normative: Crime is inherently wrong, and laws exist to uphold societal values
- Relativist: Crime is socially constructed
- Positivist: Crime is caused by external and internal factors rather than free will
- Critical: Crime is shaped by social inequality, power, and capitalism.
Lecture 2 (January 14th): The Diversity of Deviance
Deviance and Its Varied Forms
- Deviance changes depending on historical context
- Takes many forms, too many to count beyond crimes.
Physical Deviance and Appearance: Ideals of Beauty, Self-Harm, and Body Mods
- Two types
o Violation of aesthetic norms
§ What people should look like (height, weight, disfigurement)
o Physical incapacity
§ 장애
- Physical deviance may be a marker for other deviance
o Heavily tattooed, muscular women, disabled
Relationships and Deviance
- Society shapes what sexual behaviour is accepted
o Many sub-cultures challenge these norms
§ Ashley Madison agency promoting marital affairs
o Polygamy
§ Monogamy is the norm, children under 19 are married off
§ Who should decide what is right and wrong?
Deviance in Cyberspace: Making Up the Norms as We Go
- New forms of deviance has emerged
o Cyberdeviance
§ Scams, hackers, tampering
o Illegal downloads, cyberbullying, sexting, online subcultures
§ It is hard to pinpoint deviance as it is everchanging
o Cyber-world is social and public, changing our views on communities and the nature of such communities.
Subcultural Deviance
- Norms and values in subcultures may be viewed as deviant by others but acceptable in their own members
“Elite” Deviance, Corporate Deviance, and Workplace Misconduct
- Elite Deviance: Acts of elites or organizations that cause harm
o Physical Harm: Death or injury
o Financial Harms: Robbery, fraud, scams
o Moral harms: Encourage distrust and alienation among members of lower class
- Workplace Deviance
o More common but less serious deviance (being late, called in sick when not sick)
Positive Deviance
- Going against the norm for a good reason
o Risking company’s money and image to create drug that cures a disease
Global Perspectives on Types of Deviance
- Some parts of the world believe in deviance and crime based on things like gender.
o Girls are repeatedly raped by militia in Congo, Pakistani women, etc.
Explaining Deviance in the Streets and Suits
- Addiction
o The rich and famous can go to highly specialized and enclosed rehab instutitons
o Poor are forcibly sent and looked down upon. Highly racialized
- Prostitution
o Prostitutes in the street are seen as whores and ‘hook ups’ for money by wealthy and college students are not.
- Graffiti
o Where is the line of art and crime?
Lecture 3 (January 21st): Researching Deviance and Criminality
What exactly are we studying?
- Ingredients and “direction” of a hypothesis
o General hypothesis
§ Education and its relation to bearing children
o Specific hypothesis
§ As a person gains more education, they tend to bear less children
o Direction
§ Inverse
· More alcohol = slower speech
§ Positive
· More alcohol = more aggression
- Variables
o IV: Manipulated variable
o DV: Measured variable
- Operationalize Variables
o Turning abstract concepts into measurable observations
- Measurement
- Qualitative research
Reliability and Validity
- Reliable
o Results are closely tied together
- Valid
o Results are logically sound
o Internal Validity
§ Measure of how well a result supports cause-and-effect
§ i.e. how the independent and dependent variables relate
o External Validity
§ Measure of how well the study can be applied to a bigger community
o
Approaches to Studying Deviance-Field vs. “Lab” experiments (difficult in social sciences)
Field Research
- Observation of socialization in natural human setting
o Find social reasons to deviance
§ Ex. Why do strippers turn to stripping?
- Pure observations: Observing people without them having any information about observation.
- Participant observations: Researchers become a participant and observe phenomena.
o Researchers have ‘become’ nudists, erotic dancers, and lookouts for male homosexual acts
o Ethnographic studies: Study of people in their environment through participant observation
Classical Experimental Design
- Experimental group
o Pre-test
o Stimulus (anomaly)
o Post-test
- Control group
o Pre-test
o Post-test
- Random assignment
Milgram Experiment
- Wanted to know why people will follow orders and do really bad things (WWII)
o Are they good people following orders?
-
o Teacher would give shocks to learner when wrongfully answered, with gradually increasing voltage
o Experimenter would give orders to teacher
o Learner was not actually being shocked
- Ethical Issues?
Survey – Common approach to studying crime and deviance
- Response rates
o How many people fill them out
- Fact questions
- Belief questions
- Attitude questions
- Knowledge questions
Content Analysis
- Reviewing records of communication and searching for themes and trends
- Manifest
o Obvious
- Latent
o Content that is not so obvious and need to research further
- Successful Content Analysis includes
o Solid research question
o Good understanding of population
o Strategy for sampling records of communication
o Systematic approach to extracting themes and trends
Secondary Data Sources
- Data collected by others for a similar or different purpose
- Potential issues with reliability and validity
o Not always good, could have flaws in design, quality, and bias
- Value of data liberation movement
o Transparency through making data accessible
- Uniform Crime Report and the National Incident-Based Reporting System
o UCR has data compiled to bureau and presented online.
o NIBRS also by FBI to provide detailed info across jurisdictions
§ Problems
· Not much info besides type of crime
· Dark figure of crime
- SAMHSA
o Substance Abuse and Menta Health Services Administration
o Information on rug use and mental health
- DAWN (Drug Abuse Warning Network)
o Information from emergency rooms and medical examiner reports
Monitoring the Future (MTF)
- Usees funding from National Institutes of Health to survey students about attitudes and beliefs towards legal and illegal drug abuse
Ethical Issues
- Institutional review boards (IRBs)
o Protects human subjects in research
- Respect for:
o Dignity
o Consent
o Vulnerable persons
o Privacy and confidentiality
o Justice and inclusiveness
- Balancing harm and benefits
- Minimizing harm and maximizing benefits
Goal-Evidence based practices
- Professional work should include:
o Practitioner’s Individual Expertise
o Best Evidence
o Client Values and Expectations
OCAP: Self-Determination Research with Indigenous Peoples
- Ownership
- Control
- Access
- Possession
o Much of research historically were done ON Indigenous people not with.
Quasi-Experiment
- Research method that studies relationship between intervention and an outcome without randomly assigning participants
Lecture 4 (January 28th): Anomie and Strain
Equality vs Equity
- Equality: Treating everyone equally
- Equity: Fairness to all
o Judges have discretion and therefore variations between the two
o Minimum sentences is equality, but lesser harsher punishments can occur
- Merit: Rewarded based on achievement
Emile Durkheim and Anomie
- Anomie: A state of normlessness
o Society fails to regulate expectations and behaviours of its members
o Ex. Urinal rule
Social Integration and Suicide
- Communities that were more connected and socially integrated had lower levels of suicide
- Less connected communities and normlessness increased suicide
Merton – Adaptations to Anomie Strain
- Examine relationship between goals and legitimate means to achieve them
o More interested in structural goals
- Social Return On Investment
o Belief that if you invest a dollar today into something, we will save more ‘tomorrow’.
o Ex. Money into offenders to prevent recidivism to save cost of reoffending investigations
-
- Examined how people accept or reject social goals and means to achieve them
Cloward + Ohlin Differential Opportunity
- Different illegitimate opportunities available in poor, urban neighbourhoods lead to three types of criminal subcultures
o Criminal: Younger boys learn from criminal ‘seniors’
o Conflict: Social instability deprives conventional and criminal opportunities, which promote violence as a vent of stress
o Retreatist: Associated with drug culture. Cannot find a place for themselves in conflict or criminal subcultures.
Albert Cohen – Status Frustration
- Feeling frustration by an inability to achieve social status or success achieved by other members of society, typically of higher class
- Ex. Birthday party where gifts are expensive, but people who cannot afford gifts feel shame or frustration
Robert Agnew – General Strain Theory
- Strain increases likelihood of anger/frustration, leading to correcting action.
o Failure to achieve positive goals (not getting into university)
o Removal of positive stimuli (romantic relationship fails)
o Presentation of negative stimuli (car breaks down)
§ Crime can be a correcting action
Messner + Rosenfield – American Dream (institutional)
- If you just work hard enough, you can achieve your goal. Anyone can live the ‘American Dream’ (economic success).
- Ex. Hockey, where coaches, equipment, etc. cost a lot of money that maybe some people cannot afford.
o Therefore they may experience harder journey
- Value of the American Dream
o Achievement: Cultural pressures to achieve are enormous
o Individualism: Encourages everyone to find a way to ‘make it’.
o Universalism: Everyone in American society is encouraged to pursue success
o Materialism: Money is the best measure of success in society
Application of Anomie and Strain
- Criminal Records
o People who do not reoffend and aim for reintegration, should they have this removed?
o Creates barriers to buying houses, work, etc.
The Tyranny of Merit
- “Encourages the successful to inhale too deeply”
- Lets elites look down on lower class people, causing a sense of frustration and strain
- College diploma shouldn’t be a definer of social success, but people who have meaningful contributions to the common good and earning recognition for it
o Money shouldn’t be a measure of contribution to society
Critiques of Anomie and Strain Theories
- Merton’s theory is hard to test
o Assumes value consensus exists in society
o Difficulty accounting for deviance in privileged classes
o No precise definition of anomie
Lecture 5 (February 4th): Social Disorganization
Neighbourhoods lack ability to control criminality
- Looks at aggragates
o Crime rates in communities or cities over time?
- Crime mapping
o Certain crime is more popular in certain areas
§ Ex. Parking lot with more catalytic converter thefts
o Gets pinned and flagged for cops to know
o Smaller group of people are disproportionately responsible for lots of crime
Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay
- Studied youth delinquency
- Criminals are centered in business districts, and declines as we move away from them
o Reasons?
§ Downtown more densely populated
§ More structural issues
- Three factors
o Poverty
§ Greatest risk factors for justice involvement
o Population turnover
§ Lots of people moving in and out
o Heterogeneity
§ Diverse communities
- Critiques
o Individuals vs Groups
§ Too focused on groups?
o Longitudinal (very long) data is expensive/difficult to collect
o Measurement issues
- Compounding impact
o Various experiences combined together can lead to crime
§ Highlights need for social, cultural, family, and bond involvement to prevent criminality
Broken Windows Theory
- Are smaller crimes (break ins, vandalism, theft) promote higher level crimes (murder)?
Collective Efficacy
- Neighbourhoods ability to work together to achieve common goals
o Reducing crime and maintaining safety
Sex Offender Registry
- App to know where sex offenders are in the community
Dark figure
- Reported official records of crime vs how much crime ACTUALLY occurs
o Sexual assault vs car theft reporting rates
Crime funneling effect
- Number of people with justice contact is reduced as we progress in CJS
o People with police contact may not go to court
o Contact with court may not be in correctional system
The Chicago School
- Crime facilitated by destructive ecological conditions in slums rather than biological explanations
- Concentric zone model
o
o Now we see richer people move to central areas and lower class moving out due to unaffordable housing
o Work from home
§ People no longer need to be close to their workplace
Lecture 5: Differential Association and Social Learning Theories
Development of Differential Association Theory
- Edwin Sutherland
o Deviant behavior is learned
o Two things need to be learned
o Motives/drives are learned
o Excess of definitions favorable to deviant behaviour increases likelihood of committing deviance.
o Frequency, duration, priority and intensity
Development of Aker’s Social Learning Theory
- Early attempt at building on Sutherland’s differential association theory
o Ex. Dog associating salivating with bell sound
- Operant conditioning: Learning is enhanced by social and nonsocial reinforcement.
- Four concepts
o Differential Association: Learning deviance through interactions with others
o Definitions: Attitudes and beliefs that define behaviour as good or bad and can encourage deviance
o Differential Reinforcement: Balance of rewards and punishments that reinforce or dimmish deviant behaviour
o Imitation: Observing and modelling behaviour from others
Social Structure and Social Learning
- Differential Social Organization: Structural characteristics of a society that influence crime and deviance
- Differential location in social structure: How individual’s position affects exposure to deviance or conforming behaviours
- Theoretically defined structural variables: Concepts such as social disorganization or class oppression that influence social learning
- Differential social location in groups: Influence of groups one is a part of on behaviour
Application of Differential Association and Social Learning
- Vaping in schools
o Becomes a norm and learned behaviour through friends and those around
Critiques of Differential Association and Social Learning Theories
- Focus on juvenile delinquency or minor forms of deviance
- There are forms of deviance that social learning may not explain
- Debate over theoretical and empirical role of differential association
Techniques of Neutralization
- Sykes and Matza
- Five techniques
o Denial of Responsibility
o Denial of Injury
o Denial of victim
o Condemnation of the condemners
o Appeal to higher loyalties