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The sociologist coauthors, professors at the City College of New York, question the accepted theories and techniques for studying delinquents, in particular the premise that poverty causes delinquency. Stressing the
importance of viewing the psychological reality of each individual delinquent, they find that “similar objective conditions shared by our youthful respondents, for example poverty, are interpreted by them in quite different ways” (p. 20). Hence the varieties of delinquent experience. The authors have painstakingly collected potentially important data. Their taped vignettes provide an interesting and lively look into the sociological netherworld of delinquency.
They have chosen three different study groups located in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York City. The unit of study in each of these cities was taken as the “social block,” a small community not as large as a neighborhood but one in which the residents shared “a sense of belonging and of allegiance to others and of safety and security in familiar surroundings” (p. 22). “Selection of the study blocks depended upon a fundamental economic factor. Each area could be described from census tract and pretest observations as predominantly poverty stricken” (p. 24). The data derives from relatively unstructured informal interviews with 133 young people living in the three areas. The authors stress personal experiences and attitudes related to acts of delinquency, levels of aspiration, and conceptions of right and wrong. Each of the tape-recorded interviews lasted at least two hours, two interviewers meeting with one respondent. “Introducing the third person informalizes and conversationalizes the situation” (p. 35).
On occasion the authors use psychoanalytic concepts such as fixation, pleasure principle, and the unconscious, but merely as labels. Given the data that they have collected, they have numerous opportunities for attempting a psychological analysis, but they do not do this. For example, when