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From International Socialism, No.13, Summer 1963, p.37.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Family Environment and Delinquency
Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck
Routledge and Kegan Paul. 35s.
The Preface of this book warns us that it cannot be sketchily read. It is right, it is hard work. Unfortunately it is also right in doubting that a ‘neat packaging of a highly complex personal-situational phenomenon will ever be possible’. Attempts at such packaging, with conflicting disciplines expounding THE explanation and the development of progressive but vague popularizations, have sown in the field of delinquency the confusion immortalized in the song Gee Officer Krupke in West Side Story. The appearance of this volume, bristling with fearsomely competent tables and definitional chapters, is thus to be welcomed despite the hard work. The authors already have to their credit a long list of works on delinquency, and this is primarily a companion volume to their Physique and Delinquency. The major questions posed in the inquiry are (i) which of 66 character traits such as suggestibility, lack of self-criticism, acquisitiveness, etc. are largely environmentally conditioned and by what social factors? and (ii) How do these factors (reflecting family environment) and trails, in combination, bear on delinquency? As they consider 44 of such social factors, emotional disturbance of mother, alcoholism of father, poor management of family income, etc., and relate each of them to each of the 66 traits, they were faced with a total of 2,904 correlation tables for the sample of 500 delinquents and a like number for the sample of matched non-delinquents. When they introduce the further dimension of body-type, the statistical conclusions become even more complex: ‘mesomorphs (sturdy, muscular) of low verbal intelligence if reared in a home in which daily routines arc haphazard, in which the family lacks ambition to improve its status, in which the parents are inhospitable or indifferent to the child’s friends, and/or in which the father is indifferent or actually hostile to the boy. are more likely to become delinquent than are ectomorphs (thin linear, fragile type) from such environment.’ The use of this body typology which is not universally approved at the moment, does not. however, interfere with the findings simply showing the selective operation of social factors upon the delinquency of boys with certain traits (ii) above); nor does their division of these traits into various grades of hereditary or environmental origin (i) above). As a first step the jungle of selective operations is a definite advance in the study, and when further mapped (they intend to seek out intercorrelations between their traits and so have more of a personality cluster) could be really fruitful.
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