Evaluate Upbringing as an Explanation of Criminal Behaviour.

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Evaluate upbringing as an explanation of criminal behaviour. Upbringing can be defined as the background to an individual’s life where a study by Farrington can explain criminality where he focuses on youth’s backgrounds because we need to look into someone’s past experience whether offender/non-offender which might influence his/hers behaviour later on in life. Theories that use upbringing suggests that what happens during early childhood experiences which can greatly impact on a person’s susceptibility to turn to crime in the future. Farrington had come up with some other predicting factors of crime which include parental divorce and lack of supervision from parents. The study by Farrington et al. (2006) focuses on disrupted families and disadvantaged backgrounds. One approach that we can link this to the explanation is the social approach. One study that can be used to support this explanation is the Farrington et al. (2006) on the development of delinquent behaviour investigated by using a longitudinal study. The study had gathered their information throughout the boys’ lives and examined their behaviour over the years studied. In other studies such as The Peterborough Youth Study is a cross sectional study because the researcher investigated in a short period at one time. On the other hand the participants were based around the same area which would make the study misrepresentative to females. Another debate that could arise from this point is that the study was ethnocentric whereby the subjects were all males from East London so we cannot apply this research to other regions in England which means the study is misrepresentative. Reductionism is the way psychologists often explain complex phenomena’s by reducing it to a much simpler level often focusing on a single factor which could reduce the validity. Farrington et al. conducted a longitudinal study of
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