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28 Criminology 271 (1990)
Specifying the SES/Delinquency Relationship

handle is hein.journals/crim28 and id is 281 raw text is: SPECIFYING THE SES/DELINQUENCY RELATIONSHIP CHARLES R. TITTLE ROBERT F. MEIER Washington State University Theoretical and empirical work concerning socioeconomic status (SES) and delinquency has mainly been devoted, throughout the past decade, to specifying the conditions under which SES and delinquency are likely to be highly related. Three broad categories of conditions, with 12 particular subconditions, have been hypothesized as specifiers of the SES/delin- quency relationship. Here, we review the recent empirical literature as it bears on these potential specifications. The results do not support any of the conditional hypotheses about SES and delinquency, and they again challenge the idea that a negative SES/delinquency relationship is general and pervasive. Almost all of the recent research finds some condition under which SES and delinquency are significantly related, however, and several of the specification hypotheses have not been thoroughly enough investigated to permit firm conclusions about their potency. This poses a quandary for scholars trying to understand delinquent behavior. Possible responses to the situation are discussed. It is no overstatement that the relationship between social class and crimi- nal behavior is one of the most important and perennial issues in the sociol- ogy of crime. The centrality of the dispute is undeniable and on its resolution presumably hinges the fate of many theories of crime and delinquency (but see Tittle, 1983). An apparently simple question-What is the relationship between social class and criminality?-has generated a large research litera- ture, but the results of empirical investigations are inconsistent. The relation- ship is said to be positive (direct), negative (inverse), conditional, or some combination of the three. Different studies have used different samples, measures of social class, measures of delinquency or crime, and analytic pro- cedures, and some of the discrepant findings are attributable to those different methodologies. But regardless of the conceptual or methodological reasons, criminologists seem no closer to resolving the issue and identifying the nature of the relationship than 50 years ago. Most criminological data collected prior to the 1950s seemed to demon- strate strong SES differences between delinquents and nondelinquents. Indeed, the existence of a negative relationship between SES and delinquency was accepted as fact by most social scientists, and it became the basis for several theories of delinquency. But not all scholars accepted this conven- tional wisdom uncritically. Some observed that the official data on which the CRIMINOLOGY VOLUME 28 NUMBER 2 1990

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