Scaling Juvenile Delinquency

Abstract

The basic data in this research consist of a 40 per cent systematic sample of police contacts with juveniles aged six through seventeen in Madison, Wis., over a six-year period. Earlier research reports have described the distribution of police contacts, referrals for official action, and the distribution of individual delinquents according to social areas of the city. No attempt has previously been made to place the various types or patterns of delinquent behavior on an empirically derived scale or delinquency continuum.

The data in this paper cast considerable doubt on the hypothe sis of unidimensionality and the hypothesis of distinctive types of delinquent careers. Actually, relatively few delinquents who had police contacts had what could be called a career in delinquency. Juveniles with multiple contacts and what might be defined as careers in delinquency engaged in quite diversified behavior. One must tentatively conclude that the total number of police contacts by a juvenile for those reasons that involve a violation of the law or more serious juvenile misbehaviors (serious as perceived by the public and authorities in the community) will serve as an index of juvenile misbehavior about as well as or better than either Guttman scale or geometric scores. However, this conclusion must be tentative, pending a similar analysis of juvenile contact data for Racine, Wis., since Madison may be an unusual case.