Arrests of Self and Friends as Indicators of Delinquency Involvement

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.