Abstract
It has been proposed that the identification of boys with delinquent commitments might be indexed more appropriately by the official delinquency records of a boy's friends than by the boy's own records. This hypothesis was examined within a population of seven hundred junior-high-school boys by collating information from police records with responses from a question naire survey which contained sociometric items, a self-report delinquency scale, and an attitudinal index of delinquency commitment.
The findings indicate that a boy without a police record but with friends who are officially delinquent is likely to have a high delinquency commitment. However, a boy with a police record who has friends without records is also likely to have a high delinqueny commitmcnt. It is suggested that the combined use of the arrest reccords of the juvenile and of his friends promises to provide a much better means of identifying boys with differential commitments than the use of either measure alone.
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