Despite a sizable body of research extending across various academic disciplines, the question of the causal connection between broken homes and delinquency remains unresolved and ambiguous. A major weakness of this literature is the absence of any systematic conceptual specification of the broken home as a sociological variable. Although it appears intuitively simple, the broken home concept includes a number of distinct and variable issues that cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy (broken/intact). Our intention here is analytic, aimed at constructing a conceptual/theoretical foundation for subsequent empirical analyses. We identify the variety of theoretical perspectives implicit in the research literature that have been used to explain broken home effects, focusing on different functional effects of the family and postulating different causal dynamics. We also consider the various ways that the broken home is measured in extant research, the problems with such measurements, and special difficulties in the measurement of delinquency in this substantive area.
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