Bowlby’s study of forty-four juvenile thieves (1944)
Aim
·
To study teenage criminals with affectionless
psychopathy to see if they are more likely to have had an early separation than
those that did not display signs of affectionless psychopathy
·
Bowlby believed there would be a relationship,
based on the belief that prolonged separation from the primary caregiver would
have a negative impact on social, behavioural, emotional and intellectual
development.
·
To provide evidence to support his maternal
deprivation hypothesis
Procedure
·
Study
was carried out at the London Child guidance Clinic from 1936-39 with a sample
group of 44 juveniles who were involved with theft. 31 boys and 13 girls.
·
This
sample was compared to the other 44 maladjusted children who didn’t
steal/commit crimes. 34 boys and 10 girls.
·
He also looked at case histories (gained by a
social worker) and psychological testing results (done by a psychologist) from
the child. He looked particularly for patterns in the backgrounds of young
people at this clinic to find out why some would become delinquents.
·
Bowlby
gained data using unstructured interviews with the mother and child separately.
He did this to find out about childhood experiences of separation and the
relationship between the child and the mother.
·
Only
a few cases were studied because of the depth of the data required, as well as
interviews being time consuming.
·
A
case conference followed and a tentative diagnosis was formed. He diagnosed the
children to have affectionless psychopathy if they had an inability to
experience emotionally intense relationships, lacked affectionate behaviour and
had a lack of guilt when causing distress to others.
Findings
·
Of
the 14 children from the main group identified as affectionless psychopaths, 12
had experienced prolonged separation of more than six months from their mothers
in their first two years of life
·
Only
5 of the 30 delinquent children not classified as affectionless psychopaths had
experienced separations
·
Only
17% of thieves without affectionless psychopathy had experienced maternal
deprivation
·
Bowlby
also identified 6 subgroups of children. Those who were normal, depressed, circular (alternating symptoms of
depression/over-activity, hyperthymic (symptoms
of over activity), affectionless and
schizoid (withdrawn and lacking
relationships of others).
Conclusion
The young criminals who had a prolonged separation in their
first two years of life were several times more likely to exhibit affectionless
psychopathy than those who had no such separation. This provides strong support
for Bowlby’s deprivation hypothesis.
Evaluation
ü The
case study gathered a lot of detail, both qualitative and quantitative and used
triangulation so the data were in-depth, rich and valid.
ü A
control group of the same size from the same clinic matched to the juvenile
thieves was used so that the findings of the thieving group could be compared
to those of the control group, enabling Bowlby to conclude that the
affectionless psychopathic character could be linked to stealing.
û It
has been suggested by Bowlby himself that the findings would be improved had a
second control group, comprising ‘normal’ school children were used, as the
control group from the study was made from other teenagers from the clinic who
had their own emotional problems
û Bowlby
investigated IQ, emotional state, age and experiences with the mother, but
there are other important factors in a child’s development which perhaps should
have been looked into, such as the relationship with the father and school
experiences.