Deviance, selves and others 9780912764009

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nn

ee Deviance, Selves

and

Others

: Michael Schwartz and

Sheldon Stryker

Published for the Arnold M. and Caroline Rose Monograph Series, American Sociological Association.

THE ARNOLD AND CAROLINE ROSE MONOGRAPH SERIES IN SOCIOLOGY A gift by Arnold and Caroline Rose to the American Sociological Association in 1968 provided for the establishment of the Arnold and Caroline Rose Monograph Series in Sociology. The conveyance provided for the publication of manuscripts in any subject matter field of sociology. The

journals.

donors intended the series for rather short monographs, contributions that normally are beyond the scope of publication in regular academic

The Series is under the general direction of an editorial board ap- |

pointed by the Council of the American Sociological Association and

responsible to the Publications Committee of the Association. Competition for publication in the Series has been limited by the Association to Fellow,

Active and Student members. . The present work constitutes the first volume published in the series.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, under grant number PHS MH 11390.

In any research enterprise such as the one described in the following pages a number of people beyond the principal investigators contribute in important ways which it is common practice to acknowledge. But, of course, we cannot name our respondents; yet they were real partners in the project. Nor can we name the teachers and administrators of the project. Nor can

we name the teachers and administrators of the schools in which we did our work, whose cooperation was superb and whose continued interest in this work is very encouraging.

Our graduate assistants, Bernadette Barry and Thomas Bubolz, did more

than their share in data gathering and processing. Other graduate students : helped out on various aspects of the project, without pay: Gordon F. N. Fearn, Timothy F. Hartnagel, James Teevan, and David P. Roy. Mrs. Linda Kay Watson typed questionnaires and kept us generally well organized and Miss Suzanne de Gain typed several drafts of the manuscript. Professors Charles Tittle, John Scanzoni and John Gagnon gave us good

advice as we went along, and Professors Elton F. Jackson and Peter J. Burke were of inestimable aid with a number of statistical problems. The reviewers of our manuscript, not known to us, gave us some very useful advice for revisions and we thank them for their colleagueship.

Finally, a note of appreciation is due to Professor Walter C. Reckless and his colleagues and students whose own work put us on the trail of this study. M. S.

S.S. Bloomington 1970

THE ARNOLD AND CAROLINE ROSE MONOGRAPH SERIES IN. SOCIOLOGY Under the General Editorship of ALBERT J. REISss, JR., Yale University

and the Editorial Board

BERNARD BARBER, Columbia University G. FRANKLIN EpDWARDs, Howard University

EDWARD L. MCDILL, John Hopkins University NORMAN B. RYDER, Princeton University ARTHUR L. STINCHCOMBE, University of California (Berkeley) HARRISON C. WHITE, Harvard University

© American Sociological Association

1722 N St. N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036

Table of Contents }

Chapter Page I Introduction and Overview .0..0.........00c eee OL Il Identity and Deviance: The Perspective ...0..0.000cccccee 7 III The Research Hypotheses and Design ...........0.00000.0cceeeeee 17

IV _ Instrumentation: Measurement of Self 0.00000... = 33 V_ An Anomalous Setting: The Lower-Class School ..........0..0..... 55

VI Findings: The Quality of Self-Evaluation 0.0... = 74 VII Findings: The Variability of Self-Concepts 0.000.000.0000. = 81

VIII Findings: The Definers of Self 00000000000 90 IX Findings: The Problem of Masculinity ..............00000000.ccc2... 103

X Summary of Findings and Assessment of Theory ...................... 117

V

To Ettabelle To Alyce

CHAPTER |

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

In this study in the social psychology of deviance we began with the conception of an actor’s behavior as constrained in crucial ways by the structure and content of his “self.” We regarded it as constrained also by the nature of the actor’s relationships with others, as these are mediated through

that self. Given this conceptual framework, and given that deviance is behavior (albeit of a particular sort), we focused our attention upon such variables as “self-esteem,” “masculine identity,” and the mother-son relationship, as potentially important in the formulating of a theoretical account of deviance.

The specifics of our research have to do with predicted deliquency. We - compared white and Negro boys who were said by their teachers to be high delinquency risks with their counterparts whom their teachers judged to be low delinquency risks. For the most part, our work was limited to comparisons of boys in the age range 12-15, all drawn from a single school with a lower-class student body in a Midwestern metropolitan center. On occasion, however, we referred to data on older boys and boys who (unfortunately, from the perspective of the study) were all white and from a school populated by the middle class.

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 1

The ideas and the data presented in the chapters that follow are detailed and occasionally even complex—as benefits the phenomena under investigation—and the argument that links the ideas and the data may be obscured by the variation, the detail, and the qualifications made necessary when trying to come to terms with complexity. For this reason, it may be useful to provide, before the journey begins, a summary of the theory, methodology, findings, and conclusions ultimately arrived at. We hope through this means that what pleasure the reader loses by way of surprise will be more than made up for by improved communication. We began our work with a set of ideas derived from the theoretical orientation called symbolic interaction, and as the work progressed these ideas were enriched from a variety of sources. Without tracing ultimate intellectual

roots, we can point to Cohen’s (1965) critique of anomie theory, which develops a view of deviant behavior as the outcome of the imperatives of identity, and to earlier (Stryker, 1964; Stryker, 1968) attempts to formulate symbolic interaction theory somewhat more precisely than is typically the

' case aS proximate starting points. From Cohen (1965), we borrowed an image of the deviant as a role player in search of an identity, finding, building, testing, validating and expressing that identity. From Stryker (1964, 1968), we took conceptions of self in terms of a differentiated structure of identities, a conception of commitment that links identities and relationships to others, and the statement of a set of premises purporting to help us explain identity formation and change. These premises assert that (1) persons seek to create and maintain stable, coherent identities; (2) persons prefer to evaluate their identities positively; (3) identities serve to motivate behavior; (4) identities develop in the process of social interaction; (5) behavior is a function of a role-making process;

and (6) identities are stabilized by commitments. These premises are intended to apply to behavior in general. An additional premise—-namely, that primary group socialization is insufficient to inculcate norms proscribing deviance—is seen as a necessary addition to the list if deviant behavior is being

analyzed.

Our thinking was strongly influenced as well by work (Schwartz and Tangri, 1965) which sought to examine the hypothesis developed by Reckless and his associates (1956) that variations in self-concepts explain variations in vulnerability to delinquency. That work made crystal clear the need

of refined conceptualization and measurement of self-concepts; and that work led to the following questions (among others): to what degree is dependence upon mother for self-definitions related to vulnerability to delinquency? To what extent is dependence upon mother for self-evaluations a function of mothers’ demands that their sons be dependent as opposed to the

need of sons to find support for a favorable conception of self? To what degree, if at all, do effective definers of self change from primary others to secondary others; and are such shifts related to delinquency vulnerability? To a large extent, these questions served to define the original aims of the

research now being reported. It is perhaps obvious that these questions can be related to a major theme in current theorizing about delinquency—

2 INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

that delinquency among adolescent males may be viewed as an outgrowth of problems in developing a masculine identity.

During the formative period of this research, a related study (Schwartz, Fearn and Stryker, 1966) took place. The latter study both reinforced our earlier ideas and added new elements to our thinking. Dealing as this work did with emotionally disturbed children, its findings were interpreted as indicating the significance of commitment to a “disturbed role” to an understanding of this form of deviance; and the findings indicated the utility of seeing the quality of self-concepts (the degree of positive affect linked to various identities), the variability of self-concepts, and the social sources and reinforcers of these self-concepts as critical aspects of the process of becoming committed to a deviant identity. From these different sources, then, a set of hypotheses was formulated: the first, that boys who are predicted as being future delinquents evaluate themselves less positively than do those predicted as non-delinquents; the second, that the self-concepts of those predicted as being future delinquents (on the assumption that they are “moderately” committed to a delinquent identity ) vary more than the self-concepts of those predicted as non-delinquent. A third hypothesis states that teachers—as the representatives of the institutional order of the wider society—have a greater impact on the self-evaluations of those predicted to be future non-delinquents than of those predicted as delinquent.

These hypotheses are derived from a more or less coherent theoretical scheme. Only slightly related to it is another theory: that delinquency in American society is a reaction to the difficulties experienced in entering an adult male role. The masculinity-delinquency literature leads to the expectation that the identity of boys predicted as being future delinquents reveal

more concern with the problems of becoming an adult male than do the identities of boys predicted as non-delinquent, and that mothers are more influential in structuring the identities of boys considered to be future delinquents than of those regarded as potential non-delinquents. The design of the research investigating these hypotheses was admittedly less than ideal, in consequence of constraints outside our control. Data were gathered from male students in two high schools in a major, Midwestern

city. This report relies primarily upon data gathered from a non-random sample of 398 boys, 313 white and 85 Negro, drawn from a school located in an area of high social disorganization with a lower-class population. It relies secondarily upon a random sample of 49 boys, all white, drawn from a solidly middle-class school. In addition, we use findings from interviews with a sample of 94 mothers of boys in the lower-class school.

Our measurement of self-concepts relies on the semantic differential technique developed by Osgood and his associates (1957). In our view, there is an affinity between Osgood’s analysis of the development of meaning

and an analysis of the development of self that stems from the work of George Herbert Mead (1934); thus our approach to the measurement of self has a theoretical justification. It also permits operationally a differen-

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 3

tiation of self in ways demanded by our theoretical orientation. Responses to a semantic differential format using 34 pairs of polar adjectives to rate a

number of self-relevant stimuli (“I am,” “As a son, my mother thinks I am,” “As a son, my father thinks I am,” “As a student, my teachers think I am,” “As a friend, my best friend thinks I am,” “Boys think I am,” “Girls think I am”) were subjected to factor analyses. From the factor analyses, four factors consistently emerged, to which the labels Evaluation, Potency, Activity, and Interpersonal Qualities were given on the basis of the adjectives loading most heavily on each. Typically, we deal with our hypotheses by examining the evidence with respect to each of these dimensions of self, considered separately.

The semantic differential instruments were embedded in a larger questionnaire to which our high school subjects responded. The questionnaire included as well, a set of items measuring perceptions of legitimate and illegitimate opportunities drawn from the work of Short, Rivera and Tennyson (1965) together with items intended to break routine and/or to distract. The interview schedule used with mothers incorporated a parental attitude instrument (Schaefer and Bell, 1958) which seemed most appropriate to our examination of mother-son relationships which might possibly bear on the masculinity theories; and it contained a wide variety of items concerned with amounts, quality and legitimacy of control potentially exercised over their sons by a wide variety of persons and agencies.

As noted, the major source of data was a single lower-class school; thus the characteristics of this school become important to the interpretation of the findings of this research in ways not anticipated in the initial design.

The characteristics of this school became important in another way: at least at the time it simply did not fit the stereotype of the lower-class school. Rather than being organized to defeat its charges, particularly its black charges, the school was organized more or less explicitly to salvage boys, particularly blacks. This, to us, surprising feature of the school enabled us to make some sense of the findings of our research.

Teachers in the lower-class school were asked to predict which boys in their classes would at some future time probably come in official contact with the police or with the juvenile courts, and which boys would not. That is, teachers were asked to characterize their charges as potentially delinquent

or non-delinquent. On the assumption that there is some validity in such judgments, these characterizations are used to classify boys as either “bad” or “good.” Most of the analyses presented in the body of this work compare these “bad” and “good” boys.

Our findings are not particularly easy to summarize; they are complex, and.it would be unfortunate to deny or neglect that complexity. But certain summary statements seem reasonable. In general, the theory we developed, reflecting a symbolic interaction perspective, does fairly well when measured against the findings on white boys and fairly badly when measured against the findings on Negro boys. The major finding on whites that is not in ac-

cord with the theory is that young white predicted delinquents (“bad” INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

boys) do not evaluate themselves less positively than their supposedly nondelinquent counterparts (“good” boys). But older white “bad” boys have more positive self-evaluations than do younger, and this finding makes

sense on the assumption that the older boys are more committed to a deviant identity. In conformity with theoretically derived expectations, the

self in white “bad” boys is more variable than it is in white “good” boys; and older white boys exhibit less variability in self-conceptions than

| do younger, again in conformity with our theory. Finally, as expected, secondary others (teachers) appear to be significant others to white “good” boys and not to “bad” boys, whose significant others are generally primary others.

On the other hand, the theory developed out of a symbolic interaction perspective is not corroborated by the findings derived from our black subjects. True, our Negro subjects who were considered by their teachers to be low delinquency risks evaluated themselves more positively than did those Negro boys who were said to be high delinquency risks; and older Negro boys evaluated themselves more positively than did younger. But black “bad” boys have no less variable selves than do black “good” boys. And, most disconcertingly from the point of view of the theoretical structure with which we began, there is strong evidence that it is the Negro

“good” boys whose significant others are primary, and it is the Negro “bad” boys to whom teachers are significant others.

Why this difference in the success of our theory in predicting findings? We believe, in retrospect, that the problem lay in our failure seriously to consider as a conditioning variable the structure of the setting in which we investigated the relation of self to delinquency. More concretely, we assumed that the lower-class school in which we worked would conform to stereotype. As noted above, it did not; and it did not in specific ways that disturbed in the case of Negro boys the hypothesized connections between identity formation and being labelled “bad”—being said to be high delinquency risks. It departed from the stereotype in specific ways that, had we been sufficiently alert to the character of the school, might have led us to expect that teachers would indeed be significant others to Negro boys whom they saw as high delinquency risks. Further, and again in retrospect, we believe that the distortion of expected findings on Negro boys may reflect the degree to which being a lower-class black good boy is deviant in American society today. No simple version of masculinity-delinquency theory comes off very well

in the light of our findings, although perhaps it is here in particular that we need to remind ourselves of the complex issues in the theory relating masculinity and delinquency and of the complexity of the findings in this study. But, overall, there is no consistent evidence in our data that implied that delinquents in general, or any given subcategory of these delinquents, are caught up in problems having to do with the development of a masculine identity. Nor do findings derived from our interviews with mothers provide

any support to this point of view; such relationships as exist within these data tend to go counter to implications of masculinity theory. It merits particular emphasis that our data are largely a negation of theories connect-

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 5

ing delinquency with the developing of a masculine identity when the problem is located in the lower class, white or black. This general failure of the masculinity hypotheses may, of course, reflect

the inadequacy of our evidence with respect to these hypotheses; alternatively, it may reflect the inadequacy of our formulation of the hypotheses,

our failure to give them their theoretical due, so to speak. We are more inclined to view failure as indicating an important deficiency in the theoretical basis of the masculinity hypotheses as developed in the literature. The argument seems to assume that the underlying difficulty is the absence of a male model and the corresponding significance of mother in the socializa-

tion of male children and this implies in turn that role learning proceeds largely by imitation. If role learning is seen, as it is in symbolic interactionism, as fundamentally a matter of participation in role-taking exchanges,

then attention needs to be turned from the matter of the availability of male role models to the nature of the interaction connecting mother and son.

The foregoing provides an overview and a summary of what follows in detail which, we hope, will permit the reader to pursue the details without

losing sight of the main argument. Chapter II explains the theoretical perspective from which our emphasis on self and relationships to others develops; and Chapter III tells the story of the research as it developed from inception through the modifications necessitated by some rather harsh

facts of research life to the final design. The instruments used in the reSearch are the concern of Chapter IV. Chapter V describes the school setting in which the research took place.

The succeeding four chapters present the findings of this research, organized in terms of the quality (Chapter VI), variability (Chapter VID, significant others (Chapter VII), and masculinity (Chapter IX) hypotheses. The final chapter of the book, Chapter X, again summarizes our findings and states what we think we have learned from the entire research enterprise.

6 INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

CHAPTER II

IDENTITY AND DEVIANCE:

THE PERSPECTIVE

The theoretical orientation which gives larger meaning to this research 1s

that of symbolic interaction. While it is certainly true that much work on deviance has been stimulated by this point of view—for example, that of Edwin Lemert (1967), of Howard Becker (1963), of Lofland (1969), and of Erving Goffman (1959)—nevertheless anomie theory, as presented by

Robert K. Merton, has been the dominant theory of deviant behavior. Since our own orientation in part developed out of a critical appraisal of Merton’s anomie theory, we begin by discussing Merton’s treatment of the

development of deviance. }

Merton’s Theory of Anomie

First presented in 1938 (1938:672-682) and founded on Durkheim’s analysis of suicide, Merton’s formulation seeks to explain differences in the

distribution and rates of deviant behavior between social systems and among various positions within a given social system. He propounds the general principle that “. . . social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in society to engage in nonconformist rather than conformist conduct.” Societies, he postulates, have both a cultural structure and a social

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 7

Structure; deviance develops in their lack of articulation. Cultural structure includes a society’s goals, while the social structure provides the means seen as acceptable for reaching the goals.

Basic to the conceptual framework of Merton’s theory is the means-end

schema. There may be a lack of articulation between ends and means, between goals and the institutionalized processes whereby these are to be achieved. In brief, there may be an acute disjunction between cultural norms

and goals and social structured capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them. This disjunction defines the state of anomie.

The disjunction between means and ends, Merton theorizes, engenders strain in persons for whom it becomes a personal experience. And there will be various probabilities of experiencing the disjunction among persons

who are located in different parts of the society, for example, in the various strata of the class system. To rephrase: The objective state of anomie

may characterize a society when institutionalized ways of achieving culturally demanded goals are blocked for (some) members. Objective anomie may be converted to anomia, a subjective state of strain which will vary according to an individual’s position in the social system. This will occur when the actor, having internalized the goals offered by the system, assesses the means available to him to achieve the goals (the “opportunity structure’) and finds those means inadequate. Experiencing strain, he will then seek ways to alleviate it. And among the possibilities are ways that are deviant; that is, some ways of responding to strain constitute deviant behavior.

The original theory did not distinguish—as we have just done—between the objective state of anomie and the subjective state of anomia. This dis-

tinction, first made by Leo Srole (1956:709-716), was incorporated by Merton into the version of his theory which he had formulated in his re__ buttal to his critics (1957). Moreover, although it seems to be not generally recognized, anomie theory assumes that the reduction of tension is a basic motivator of human behavior—an assumption which serves to relate anomie theory to a long tradition in general psychology.

This general theory was used by Merton by way of example to account for the presumed differentials in rates of criminal behavior by social class in the United States. He argues that the goal of (monetary) success can be assumed to be internalized by all members of society. Yet institutionalized means to success—for example, the educational system—are to a significant degree denied to those in the lower class. Having learned to want success, but enjoying only limited access to the legitimate means of achieving it, the lower-class person turns to nonlegitimate means. His deviant behavior is his adaptation to the strain brought about by the disjunction between ends and means.

From our reaction to Merton’s theory as just sketched emerged our orientation to the data of our research. Merton, however, took a further step in the construction of his theory. Conceptualizing deviance as behavior departing from norms society defined as binding for persons in given posi-

8 IDENTITY AND DEVIANCE: THE PERSPECTIVE

tions in society, he realized that deviance can take many forms. He then sought to explain their variety by specifying modes of individual adaptation. Acceptance of both goals and means is the mode of adaptation called conformity. Acceptance of goals but with rejection of institutionalized means is innovation (thus certain kinds of crime are innovative adaptations).

Rejection of goals while the means are accepted is a third adaptive mode, ritualism. And, finally, rejection of both goals and means is retreatism.

Criticisms of Merton’s Theory Particularly in the past few years, every facet of Merton’s theory, from its logical structure to the presumed empirical truths which it seeks to explain has been subjected to criticism.1 A brief survey of the range of criticism will serve as a warning against the difficulties inherent in theory building in this area and against too facile attempts at a general theory of deviant behavior. And a more thorough look at particular criticisms will suggest where theoretical opportunities may lie.

Striking at a fundamental premise of Merton’s theory is the objection that much of human behavior does not lend itself to a means-ends schema, and that therefore the theory of anomie must fail as a general explanation of deviance. It is claimed that in its logic the theory is narrowly circular since it uses deviant behavior as evidence of anomie, and then uses anomie to explain deviant behavior. A basic criticism is that by defining deviance as a violation of generally accepted norms the theory ignores the pluralistic patterns of values and norms characterizing modern society (and even the “simpler” preliterate societies which inspired the emphasis on the normative in American sociology). It is argued, furthermore, that Merton’s is not

: a theory of deviant behavior at all, but rather a theory of deviant motivation, and that Merton grossly oversimplifies and misinterprets when he neglects to identify the variables intervening between motivation and behavior (Cohen, 1966:74-83). The empirical basis of Merton’s original work—the presumed greater in-

cidence of crime as a particular form of deviance in the lower class—is challenged as depending upon defective statistical evidence. To the degree that this is a valid complaint, Merton’s theory is built on air. It has been pointed out, besides, that some persons are disadvantaged not only with respect to the available legitimate means to success, but that they may well be disadvantaged with respect to illegitimate means, as well. In brief, there

is a legitimate opportunity structure and it must be taken into account in building theories of deviance (Cloward and Ohlin, 1960).

Again, in the light of empirical data it cannot be assumed that the success goals of American society are shared equally by all. The lower class does not in general aspire to the kind or level of success aimed at by the middle class. Nor, it appears, does the lower class in general find non-legitimate means any more attractive than does the middle class. 1 In this discussion we are indebted to Clinard (1964), particularly the chapters by Lemert, by Short, and by Lindesmith and Gagnon.

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 9

Then, too, there are operational criticisms. How wide does the gap between aspirations and the means of achieving them legitimately need to be before anomie exists? How does one measure the gap? Further, the theory assumes that some aspirations are unrealistically high. How is this judgment

to be reached and defended? How impenetrable must the legitimate opportunity structure be to bring about anomie? Success is said to be too narrowly conceived, that status and power must be included as well as wealth. And it is claimed that the unit in which success is to be sought is too broadly conceived: that the local community, peer group, and so on, offer arenas for success, as well as does the total society.

To return briefly to the problem of definition, there is available no agreed upon, unambiguous conception of deviant behavior. True, it is generally held that certain classes of behavior are deviant (for example, crime, delinquency, addiction to narcotics) although there will be some who dispute the assignment of each class to the category of deviance. Many argue

that there is no legitimate way of classifying such behavior in general, that one cannot call a given instance of such behavior deviant unless he knows the specific circumstance of the behavior; e.g., addiction may be deviant or non-deviant depending on the specific conditions surrounding it. More important perhaps is the argument that deviance is a political category, to be understood as an imposition by the politically powerful on the politically impotent rather than as a violation of norms on which there is general agreement. We will return to this conception of deviant behavior.

The single most forceful, and for present purposes the most relevant, critique of anomie theory is by Albert K. Cohen (1965:5-14) who contends that Merton’s formulation is in many respects atomistic and invividualistic rather than sociological. “Within the framework of goals, norms and opportunities, the process of deviance was conceptualized as though each individual—or better, role incumbent—were in a box by himself. . . . The bearing of others’ experience—their strains, their conformity and deviancy,

, their success and failure—on ego’s strain and consequent adaptations is

comparatively neglected” (ibid., 6). )

If Cohen were talking only about processes of comparison that might affect the role incumbent, then the concept of reference group—whose introduction into sociological theory is largely thanks to Merton—would seem sufficient to answer Cohen’s charge of “individualistic bias.” But Cohen’s criticism goes too deep for so simple a corrective.

Like most theorizing in sociology, anomie theory, says Cohen, suffers from a basic discontinuity: it formulates theory in terms of only initial state variables and ultimate outcomes rather than in terms of “. . . processes whereby acts and complex structures of action are built, elaborated, and transformed.”’ Anomie theory, in short, is insufficient in that it fails to recog-

nize that “Human action, deviant or otherwise, is something that develops in a tentative, groping, advancing, backtracking, sounding-out process. People

taste and feel their way along. They begin an act and do not complete it. They extricate themselves from progressive involvement or become further

10 IDENTITY AND DEVIANCE: THE PERSPECTIVE

involved to the point of commitment” (ibid., 8-9). This process must be explicitly recognized in a theory of deviant behavior.

Cohen’s understanding of human action is, of course, not new. What he describes is a “role-making process,” to use the language of Ralph Turner (1962:21-25), which comes about because men are necessarily involved in systems of symbolic interaction. And, as Turner explicitly argues, this mode of conceptualizing human action contrasts with a conception of role as a more or less faithful reproduction of the normative expectations

of others. It is a mode of conceptualizing human action which entered sociology through George Herbert Mead and has been developed in what has come to be called symbolic interaction theory. Symbolic Interaction Theory and the Problem of Deviance Viewing phenomena from the perspective of symbolic interaction does not necessarily require rejecting Merton’s conception of deviance. Nevertheless, many using the ideas of symbolic interaction are unwilling to accept Merton’s definition of deviant behavior as the violation of generally agree-upon norms. Most of their objections center upon the arguments, first, that it is difficult Gif not impossible) to find “generally agreed-upon” norms with specific implications for behavior, given the complex and socially differen-

tiated character of modern society; and, second, that efforts to discover just who agrees to such norms lead to a conceptual morass.

Much more congenial to a symbolic interactionist perspective, although admittedly afflicted with problems of its own, is a political conception of deviant behavior. This begins with the proposition that in a given society effective rules governing social behavior, rather than being “generally agreedupon,” are elaborated and enforced by those who command political power.

It is they who formulate the “official” norms and who organize society to enforce them.

Some at least of the dilemmas inherent in such a definition of deviant behavior as Merton’s are met by this change in orientation. For example, that those who lay down society’s rules and presumably agree on what the rules should be, are often themselves violators of these very rules. challenges at the outset the conception of deviance as departure from generally

agreed-upon norms. To a political conception of deviance, however, this | state of affairs presents no anomaly, for the holders of political power frequently enjoy exemption from rules they themselves helped to promulgate.

And it is also true that rules are often promulgated for other than those who shape them.

From this political point of view, a given act is deviant not because of its own intrinsic characteristics nor those of the norm it violates. Rather, it is

deviant because it runs counter to an official norm of the whole society or of one of its subsystems. Such a norm need not be embodied in law to be official. Emotionally disturbed children receiving therapy through a psychiatric clinic fall properly within the category of “deviant.” Such problem children have not, as a rule, broken any law but their behavior violates the proprieties as defined by the political community, for which violation

DI:VIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 11

they are “stigmatized,” to use Goffman’s (1963) perceptive term, and subsequently “treated.” From this point of view, in short, a given act is deviant because it is politically defined as such and a given person is deviant because he is so labelled by those commanding political power. And, from this point of view, a general problem of the social psyschology of deviance

is the question: Why do given persons violate the norms as defined by those who have the power of definition?

This way of conceptualizing deviant behavior implies that norms violated by such behavior are in their very nature (whatever may be the case with norms in general) categorical. And, as such, they are impersonal. This implication is important in what follows. To push beyond the matter of definition, what is suggested by a symbolic interaction perspective on deviance? Among the variety of summary state-

ments of symbolic interactionism we turn to that of Cohen, whose treatment is particularly relevant:

The starting point is the actor engaged in an ongoing process of finding, building, testing, validating and expressing a self. The self is

linked to roles... in a very integral and dynamic way .. . (Roles) .. . enter into the very structure of the self. They are a part of the categorical system of a society, the socially recognized and meaningful categories of persons. They are the kinds of people it is possible to be in that society. The self is constructed of these possibilities, or some organization of these possibilities. One establishes a self by successfully claiming membership in such categories.

To validate such a claim one must know the social meaning of membership in such roles: the criteria by which they are assigned, the qualities of behavior that function as signs of membership, the character-

istics that measure adequacy in the roles . . . (This learning) .. . continues even after one has become more or less committed to a

role, in the process of presenting one’s self, experiencing and reading the feedback, and correcting one’s notion of what it is to be that kind of person. An actor learns that the behavior signifying membership in a particular role includes the kinds of clothes he wears, his posture and gait, his likes and dislikes, what~he talks about and the opinions he expresses—everything that goes into what we call the style of life. Such aspects of behavior are difficult to conceptualize as either goals or means;

in terms of their relation to the role, at least, their function is better described as expressive or symbolic . . . (M)uch deviant behavior... is directly expressive of roles. A tough and bellicose posture, the use of obscene language, participation in illicit sexual activity, the immoderate consumption of alcohol, the deliberate flouting of authority, a generalized direspect for the sacred symbols of the “square” world, a taste for marijuana, even suicide—all of these may have the primary function of confirming, in the language of gesture and deed, that one is a certain kind of person. The message-symbol relationship, or that of claim and evidence, seems to fit this behavior better than the means-ends relationship.

12 IDENTITY AND DEVIANCE: THE PERSPECTIVE

One important implication of this view is that it shifts the focus of theory and research from the disjunction (of means and ends) and its resolution to the process of progressive involvement in, commitment to, and movement among social roles, and the processes whereby one learns the behavior that is significant of the roles. One may, like the child acquiring his sex identity, come to accept and identify with a role

before he is quite clear what it means to be that sort of person, how one goes about being one. But once one has established the identity, he has an interest in learning these things and making use of the learning. Thus Howard Becker’s dance band musicians arrive at that estate by various routes. For many of them, however, it is only as this identity is crystallized that they fully learn what being a musician means within the world of musicians. They discover, so to speak,

what they are, and what they are turns out to be highly unconventional people. We seek roles for various reasons, some of them having

little to do with tension reduction and having found the roles, come into unanticipated legacies of deviant behavior.

The same processes operate in movement in the other direction, toward restoration of conformity. They are most dramatically illustrated in re-

ligious conversion. As the sinner is born again, with a new identity fashioned out of new roles, whole bundles of behavior, not all of them

deviant, are cast aside and new bundles are picked up . .. The decisive event is the transformation of self and social identity. At that moment a wholesale transformation of behavior is determined.

(Cohen, 1965: 12-13)

While Cohen’s interpretation of deviant behavior as a function of what may be called imperatives of identity is pregnant with suggestions, it falls

short of actually being a theory of deviant behavior. The same may be said of other writings which develop related and comparable ideas and also of what immediately follows. All are prologues to a theory, rather than the theory itseli—if a theory is a systematic set of hypothesized relationships among specified variables.

What is needed to transform insight into theory proper is the inclusion of specified concepts as variables, a set of premises or postulates from which relationships among the variables can be inferred, and a set of hypotheses which state in testable from the inferred relationships among variables. There are too many conceptual and logical gaps in what follows

to constitute a theory in this sense. But it is to be hoped that it makes a beginning of the difficult task of translating hunch and insight into theory. Components of the Self ? A major problem in developing a symbolic interactionist theory of deviant behavior lies in the imprecision of its major concepts. The concept 2 Much of this section and the following as well was initially formulated in Stryker (1968). Ideas in many respects parallel may be found in McCall and Simmons (1966). Also relevant is Lofland’s (1969) discussion of “pivotal categories” (p. 124) and his treatment of the import of affective bonds in facilitating what he calls the “escalation of identity” (pp. 187 ff).

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 13

of self as—in Mead’s language—that which is an object to itself, is central to the thinking of symbolic interactionists. But this concept as frequently used in theoretical discourse is too unrefined to permit very precise asser-

tions. And as it is all too often used it is not a variable at all. That is, the tendency is to see the self as an undifferentiated and unorganized unity. So conceived, it permits only the grossest of theoretical statements (such as,

for example, the statement that the self is shaped in social interaction). If, however, the self is to be regarded as a complex, differentiated and organized unit, then what are the appropriate terms for its conceptualiza-

tion? First of all, we can conceptualize the self as comprising a set of discrete identities. Identities are internalized designations of position, claimed and validated in social interaction. They are the “roles . . . which

enter into the very structure of the self... the socially recognized and meaningful categories of persons . . . it is possible to be in... (a)... society” (ibid., 12) This usage requires the attribution of positional designations to participants in relationships and the acceptance of such designa-

tions by them. This requirement of identities, as well as the affinity of this usage to so-called labeling theory, is indicated by Stone (1962:94):

. . . (W)hen one has an identity, he is situated—that is, cast in the shape of social object by the acknowledgement of his participation or membership in social relations. One’s identity is established when others

place him as a social object by assigning him the same words of identity that he appropriates for himself or announces... Such a conception of identity is, indeed, close to Mead’s conception of

the “me,” the self as object related to and differentiated from others . . . Identity is intrinsically associated with all the joinings and departures of social life. To have an identity is to join with some and depart from others, to enter and leave social relations at once.

Thus, a boy may have a set of identities which include “son,” “friend,” “student.” Each of these is “situated”—1.e., it is embedded in a structure of relationships, “son’”’ with father and mother, “student” with teachers, “friend”

with a set of peers. Such identities are, in effect, cognitive responses the human organism makes to itself. But the self can be further conceptualized: it consists not only of cognitive categories but also of conative and cathectic categories, that is, responses to oneself that follow on the stems, “I want” and “I feel.’’ Desire and affect as responses to oneself, together with cogni-

tive responses in the form of identities can be said to make up the structure of the self.

Just as identities are differentiated, so desires and affectual responses to oneself are differentiated. The affectual- responses to self, linked to particular identities, provide one set of refinements which may permit a more precise usage of the concept of self.

Presumably related to both identity and to such modalities of response to self as affect, yet analytically independent of these, is “commitment.” This concept, which we shall use in accounting for our findings, refers to “the relations to others formed as a function of acting on choices, such

14 IDENTITY AND DEVIANCE: THE PERSPECTIVE

that changing the pattern of choice requires changing the pattern of relationships to others. To the degree that one’s relationships to specific others depend on one’s being a particular kind of person, one is committed to being that kind of person” (Stryker, 1968:560).

The Premises of Our Study On the basis of the concepts outlined, we can draw up a set of premises with certain implications about the etiology of deviant behavior. These premises, in somewhat less than completely explicit form, guided the research being reported.

1. Persons seek to create and to maintain stable, coherent identities. 2. They prefer identities with positive affect; in other words, people prefer to think well of themselves.

3. Identities are motivational forces; they are imperatives to behavior which enacts or symbolizes them.

4. Identities develop in the process of social interaction. Shared expectations of behavior, they emerge from the relationship of person and others with whom he is embedded in networks of social interaction.

5. Concretely, behavior is a function of a role-making process. All behavior, including that which is deviant, involves the interplay of definitions of self and reactions of others; or, to state it in another way, the interplay of claims of identity and their verification or denial.

6. Identities are fixed or stabilized by commitments. The actor’s investment in his network of social relationships reinforces the significance to him of the identity on which his network is based.

7. The final premise leads off from the observation of Blake and Davis (1964:461-464) that the very concept of norm implies that behavior may differ from what the norm specifies and that it-will differ unless some effort or force produces conformity. The final premise, then, is that, while the

process of socialization is one way whereby behavior is_ brought to conform to norms, socialization in primary groups cannot be relied upon to eliminate deviance. As noted, norms proscribing deviance are categorical

and hence impersonal. Primary groups are unlikely to exclude deviance; first, because many of them are not carriers of the norms laid down by the politically dominant groups; furthermore, primary groups are likely to be too deeply committed to individuals as unique personalities to punish effectively transgressions against impersonal, categorical norms; moreover, even

if primary groups do carry the appropriate norms and do seek to enforce them, their efforts will be rendered ineffectual by the intimacy between members. The members know one another “too well,” and thus are in position to see one another’s faults and imperfections, as well as to witness each other violating the very norms the group seeks to inculcate.

The corollary of this premise—the other side of the coin—is that if socialization is to bring about behavior which conforms with norms promulgated by the politically powerful, it will have to be done by represen-

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 15

tatives of secondary groups—by the teacher in the school system, the min-

ister in the church, or the policeman in the system of law enforcement. Such secondary groups are, first of all, more or less constrained to carry the norms promulgated by the power centers whose agents they are. Moreover, they are far enough removed from the individual to apply norms impersonally and categorically, and to mete out effective sanctions. To state it another

way: as Bettelheim (1949) argues, love is not enough, nor is acceptance enough, even if one were to make the completely unwarranted assumption that in primary groups the members are universally loved and accepted. Not that love and acceptance are irrelevant to the effective inculcation of impersonal norms; they are merely insufficient. Love and acceptance must be combined with insistence on conformity and with punishment of nonconformity.

These are the premises concerning behavior in general and deviance in particular which shaped our inquiry into delinquency.

Postscript: Labeling Theory

Much of the current interest in identity and deviance comes from “labeling theories” (Becker, 1963; Scheff, 1966; Lofland, 1969). These theories in general focus more on the functioning of labeling agents and agencies than on the identities ultimately produced by the labeling process.

Much of the pertinent literature assumes that if one views another as a deviant he will necessarily respond to that other as a deviant. Indeed, there is a certain determinism in current labeling notions, a determinism implied in Becker’s (1963:6) statement: “(D)eviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others

of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender.’ The deviant is one to whom the label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label.”

That one can view another as nasty and yet behave toward that other as though he were pleasant seems not to be recognized. Nor is much said about the conditions under which individuals do and do not accept labels attached to them by others: there is reason to believe that, at least in part, they can psychologically control the effectiveness of attempts to Jabel them.

The apparent determinism of labeling theory is challenged by reference group theory, cognitive structuring theory, and symbolic interaction theory,

all of which force us to see people as active participants in the process by which they become “labeled.” Glaser (1968) makes much the same point in noting that learning to be deviant or non-deviant is crucial; and that simply being surrounded by definitions favorable to deviance is unlikely to in itself cause deviance.

Lofland (1969), in a sophisticated and subtle version of labeling theory, explores variations in imputational processes and conditions on the explicitly symbolic interaction assumption “. . . that acceptance of a personal identity

by Actor is facilitated when Others impute it” (1969:131). He does not, however, explore variations in responses to imputations as these may together shape identities.

16 IDENTITY AND DEVIANCE: THE PERSPECTIVE

CHAPTER III

THE RESEARCH HYPOTHESES AND DESIGN

To focus our theoretical perspective and the current literature concerning identity and delinquency on the study we undertook, we will trace the development of our research from its original conception and design. We will recount how, as our work proceeded, developments made it impossible to follow our first plans.~Changes in conception followed as a con-

sequence of, for one thing, the unavoidable revision of the design, and, for another, pilot work and related efforts to study deviance. The Original Aim

In an early formulation of our objectives we intended to examine the hypothesis developed by Reckless and his associates that self-concepts are

related to delinquency either by “insulating” the individual and so protecting him from engaging in delinquent behavior, or by increasing his vulnerability to it (Reckless, Dinitz, and Murray, 1956:744-746). Insulation is the product of internalized non-delinquent values and of conformity to the expectations of the significant others through whose reacions the sense of self is developed. In the same way, increased vulnerability is the product of a sense of self reflecting the expectations of significant others.

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 17

But, as noted in the research by Reckless et al., whereas “good” boys view themselves as unlikely to get into trouble and their parents and teachers concur, “bad” boys view themselves as probable candidates for delinquent behavior and their parents and teachers agree with them. -

A critical analysis of the work of Reckless and his associates (1956; 1957; 1958; 1960; 1962) leads to the conclusion that, while their belief that self and deviance are related in particular ways may be sound, their methods in seeking to validate it are weak indeed. In particular (and this is a failing hardly peculiar to them), they offer no ground rules for differentiating between the subjects’ self-relevant responses to instruments designed to elicit information from them and their responses which are not self-relevant. Nor do they supply ground rules for differentiating the particular aspects of self that may “make a difference’’ with respect to deviance

in general or delinquency in particular. In brief, given the absence of ground rules, anything an actor says or does is “self,” and the chances of

reaching any very precise conclusion by means of a construct of such spacious dimensions are virtually nil.

. Beyond these problems, and to some degree implied in the above

statement of them, is the fact that Reckless’ work fails to draw the necessary distinction between recognizing expectations of others and incorporating these expectations into one’s self, between knowing how others evaluate

one and attaching that evaluation to some particular identity. In the context of their research, a “bad” boy may be aware that teachers and mother think him “bad” yet reject their evaluations as irrelevant to his identity as boy, student, or son.

The key to resolving these issues is the development of an adequate or at

least a more adequate way of measuring relevant aspects of identities. Pursuing this goal was the object of pilot work done in Detroit (Schwartz and Tangri, 1965). Their measuring instrument was a ten-scale semantic differential, composed of ten pairs of polar adjectives and interposed sevenstep scales. The polar adjectives were superior-inferior, tough-soft, unselfishselfish, friendly-unfriendly, kind-cruel, smart-stupid, useful-useless, impor-

tant-unimportant, square-cool, and good-bad. Subjects, all sixth-grade, twelve-year-old boys, were asked to describe four “phrases” by checking the point on the seven-step scale which best fit each phrase. The phrases

were “I am,” “My friends think I am,” “My mother thinks I am,” and “My teachers think I am.”

Apart from its use of the semantic differential to measure self, the study design was reasonably close to that used by Reckless. Teachers, the principal

and the assistant principal of an all-Negro, inner-city, lower-class school were asked to name the boys in their classes who in their opinion would certainly one day come in official contact with the police or the juvenile courts, as well as those who would not. By this means twenty-seven boys were classed as “good,” twenty-four as “bad” boys, the classification being made after all sixth-grade boys had completed the semantic differential instrument.

18 THE RESEARCH HYPOTHESES AND DESIGN

Comparison of the mean scores of the two groups of boys on the “I am’ phrase indicated that the “good” boys evaluated themselves more favorably than did the “bad” boys. This finding, of course, is in agreement with the earlier finding of Reckless and his associates. It is also the case that the “good” boys perceived their friends, mothers, and teachers as evaluating them to a significant degree more positively than did the “bad” boys. Thus we can tentatively conclude that there is a direct relationship between positive self-images and the perception that others evaluate one favorably. While the evidence at hand does not in itself justify a directional causal assertion, symbolic interaction theory does, of course,

specify that self-concepts are the product of the perceptions of the responses of others and ultimately of the actual responses of others, an hypothesis with which the evidence is at least consistent.

If, however, one has in mind the distinction, noted above, between knowing how others evaluate one and attaching such evaluations to a particular identity, one is confronted with further questions. Are there differences in the extent to which “good” boys and “bad” boys perceive their self-concepts to be shared by given others? Are there differences in the elements of self

which “good” and “bad” boys perceive themselves to share with given others? Assuming the causal relationship suggested above, do “good” and “bad” boys differentially use their perceptions of mothers’, friends’, and teachers’ evaluations of them as the basis of their own self-evaluations? It

is possible that these three sources of self-evaluations are “used” in essentially equivalent ways. But it is also possible that “good” boys use one or another of them in ways that differ from their use by “bad” boys.

To check these possibilities, correlation coefficients were computed be-

tween the total “I am” scores and each of the scores relating to perceptions of others’ evaluations of self, namely, to “My mother thinks I am,” - “My friends think I am,” and “My teachers think I am.” (Table 1.) TABLE 1

Correlations Between Self-Concept and Perceived Mother’s, Friends’ and Teachers’ Concepts

Bad Boys Good Boys Friendsthinks Mother think Friendsthinks Mother think I am I am I am I am I am I am

Friends 27 — — 28 — — Mother 18 .60* — .67** 4% — Teachers 42* .68* 32 22 .61* .41* *Significant at .0S level. ** Significant at .01 level.

The table contains some surprises in its failure to support certain rather commonplace assumptions. For neither category of boys was perception of

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 19

friends’ evaluations related to self-evaluation. Perceptions of mothers’ evaluations were closely related to the self-evaluations of “bad” boys, but not of “good” boys. It is less surprising that perceptions of teachers’ evaluations

were related strongly to “good” boys’ self-evaluations but only weakly to the self-evaluations of “bad” boys. Both “good” and “bad” boys saw these three categories of others as viewing them in reasonably similar ways.

On these data, certain summary statements may be based:

1) “bad” boys perceive that they share more elements of their selfevaluations with their mothers than they share with either their friends or their teachers;

2) “good” boys perceive that they share more elements of their selfevaluations with their teachers than they share with either their mothers or their friends;

3) both “bad” and “good” boys perceive others—mothers, friends, teachers—as sharing views of them which they themselves do not share. That means, then, that not all perceptions of responses of others to one are incorporated into one’s self;

4) perceptions of peers’ responses to self are related very little if at all to the self-evaluations of either “good” or “bad” boys.

This last finding—the apparent “irrelevance” of friends—might be seen

as an artifact of the research design. Twelve-year olds only were used as subjects and it may be that in their case the peer dependency noted by others was yet to come into being.

The remaining findings are more troublesome, but also more suggestive. Assuming that the findings are reliable and not artifacts of the method, we wonder whether the strong relationship between “bad” boys’ self-images and their perceptions of their mother’s evaluations of them (and conversely,

the absence of this relationship in the case of “good” boys) means an exclusive dependence of “bad” boys on mother’s opinion and the consequent ineffectiveness of extra-familial others as agents of social control. Does mother so pre-empt the self of the “bad” boy that representatives of the impersonal, institutional structure of society (the teacher, the police, the minister) can make no impression upon him? Are “bad” boys more inclined to delinquency by reason of the absence of commitment to secondary others, which commitment is precluded by commitment to mother?

Are “good” boys good because there is room for secondary others to have an impact on their self-concepts? Such are the questions raised by the findings of this Detroit study.

Still further questions arise out of that work. The strong commitment of “bad” boys to their mothers, implied by the findings, can come about through a variety of processes. And it is possible that the key to proneness to delinquency lies in the manner in which such commitments are established. Possibly “bad” boys find that, apart from mother, the world is so unfavorable or so meaningless in its bearing on their attempts to build a self that they are driven to a strong commitment to mother, to gain any

20 THE RESEARCH HYPOTHESES AND DESIGN

support at all for an organized self. Or it may be that this commitment is a response to insistent demands on the part of mothers that their sons be and remain dependent upon them. Again, it may be that differences in the conditions of the implied commitment are a variable of overriding consequence.

On the basis of such considerations, we intended originally to deal with

four substantive issues directly relevant to the broader question of the relation of self to deviance: (1) to what degree, if at all, is dependence upon peers for self-definitions a function of age? (2) to what degree is dependence upon mother for self-definitions related to vulnerability to delinquency? (3) to what extent is dependence upon mother for selfevaluations a function of mothers’ demands that their sons be dependent rather than of sons’ need of support for a favorable conception of self?

(4) to what degree, if at all, are primary others replaced by secondary

Others as effective definers of self? And are such shifts related to vulnerability to delinquency?

The Original Design

At first we planned to draw our subjects from the population of high school juniors and seniors in a major Midwestern city, working through the school system. We hoped to sample subjects in sufficient number to permit examination of the relationship between self-concepts and deviance

in boys and girls, both whites and blacks, middle- and lower-class, and at each age from twelve through sixteen. We had tentatively settled on a total sample of 500.

Given information on the self-concepts of our male subjects of school age, we planned to interview the mothers of boys with good and those with bad self-concepts. We hoped to elicit data from subjects and from their mothers which would indicate the extent of dependence of the former

upon the latter and the degree to which the mothers demanded dependence. The categories, race and class, were to be considered in the mothers’ interviews.

Our interest was not, however, in self-concepts per se nor in dependency relationships but only in how such concepts might fit into an explanation of deviance. We intended to establish categories of deviant and non-deviant boys by a detailed examination of police records. While ‘“adjudicated delinquents” would, of course, not exhaust the category of those who have engaged in deviant behavior, official records, would, we thought, yield a categorization more defensible for our purposes than other available procedures, such as self-reported deviance. There are advantages in

using self-reported deviance for many research purposes, and excellent | work using this procedure has been done (e.g., Short and Nye, 1958). But our interest is in identity formation and commitment and stems in part from a labeling perspective. Thus, it seemed important to be able to categorize boys by their contacts with labeling agencies.

We did plan at first to secure the teachers’ naming of “good” and “bad” boys, following Reckless’ procedure and that used in the pilot work

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 21

done by Schwartz and Tangri in Detroit which we have just described. We

hoped to use this information as an additional check on the validity of teachers’ assessments as predictors of delinquency or non-delinquency.

In summary, then (and assuming the development of useful measurement devices to tap self-concepts), we planned in the beginning to draw from the schools of a Midwestern city samples of males and females aged twelve through sixteen, differentiated by class and race, to classify the subjects according to the quality of their self-concepts, to interview mothers of. boys in the samples with varying self-concepts, and to relate the resulting data to adjudicated delinquency.

Unfortunately, the plans did not work. In the first place, the central school administration refused to give its approval to the project and to facilitate our getting the support of authorities in individual schools. However, we were told, in effect, that we might try to make arrangements with individual school principals. We were not surprised when the principals proved reluctant to cooperate with us under these circumstances; the coolness of the central administration was all too apparent and influential.

At this point we considered conducting the research in another city. However, we lacked the necessary time and money. Other major cities were located so far away as to make the necessary repeated trips prohibitively expensive. Consequently, we persisted in our search in the nearest city in spite of the local impediments to research.

Fortunately, we did succeed in securing the full and quite remarkable cooperation of one maverick principal who presided over a school located

| in a lower-class, racially mixed area. Thus it was possible to preserve at least in degree the earlier plan to analyze both black and white cohorts. Somewhat later we gained the more limited cooperation of a second principal whose school was white and middle-class.

The principal of the middle-class, white school refused to permit his teachers to characterize any student as “bad,” that is, to predict he would eventually come in contact with the police. The significance of this fact becomes apparent when it is seen in conjunction with another—most important—circumstance: a thorough examination of the police records failed to reveal more than a handful of “official” delinquents at the school. Thus,

without teachers’ ratings it became impossible to discern which of the middle-class white subjects could reasonably be characterized as delinquents or as potential delinquents.

That there were very few students with records of delinquency at the middle-class, white high school is not particularly noteworthy although recent inquiries into middle-class delinquency (Vaz, 1967) might have led one to expect more. It was, however, something of a shock to us that relatively few of the students at the lower-class, racially mixed high school

were on record with the police. At present we will not say why, but will point out only that under these circumstances teachers’ predictions of “good” and “bad” boys took on more importance in the research than was

at first intended.

22 THE RESEARCH HYPOTHESES AND DESIGN

When we were prevented from following the original design of our research, it was at the cost of vitiating many of the comparisons we had hoped to make. Some cross-class comparisons, for example, were now out of the question. Fine age comparisons under conditions of control also were now beyond our reach, largely because we had to take age groups as they existed in a particular school, instead of sampling widely throughout the school system to secure adequate numbers of given ages by race or by class.

A Theoretical Extension

Meanwhile, the reasoning behind our work was in part reinforced and

in part extended by a piece of research undertaken in Canada.’ This work was done in two small psychiatric institutions which treated emotionally disturbed children as in-patients. Seventy-eight of the children were studied; thus the numbers were small and the findings no more than suggestive. The children all engaged in highly aggressive, “acting out’ behavior; none was seriously psychotic or autistic. The therapists in the institutions, all of whom were psychiatric social workers or trained childcare workers, were heavily neo-Freudian in their manner of conducting therapy sessions.

The therapists placed each of the children for whom they were responsi-

ble into one of four categories of prognosis for recovery: “very good,”

“good,” “poor,” and “very poor.” Only nine children fell into the

“poor” and “very poor” categories; thirty-eight were classified as “good” and thirty-one as “very good.” The groups were very similar in age, sex,

length of time in therapy, and so on. The mean age in the groups was 12.5 years; the mean time in therapy was twenty months.

Each child was individually administered a semantic differential instru-

ment on which he rated five stimuli on a set of clearly evaluational polar adjectives (e.g., bad-good, stupid-smart, clean-dirty). The five stimuli included: “How you feel about yourself,” “The way you feel your mother sees you,” “The way you feel your father sees you,” “The way you feel your best friend sees you,” and “The way you feel (therapist’s name) sees you.” Ten polar adjectives, selected through item analysis, made up an index of self-evaluation.

On the average, the children with “very good” prognoses turned out to have the lowest evaluation of themselves, those with “good’’ prognoses a slightly better one, and the children with “poor” or “very poor’ prognoses rated themselves distinctly better than did the other two groups.

When the prognosis categories were compared across the ten evaluative scales for the stimulus, “How you feel about yourself,” statistically significant differences appeared in variability; the category “very good” showed

the greatest degree of variability within individuals and the “poor” and “very poor” categories showed the least. Those children, then, for whom ! The following pages are an adaptation of the more complete report of the study in Schwartz, Fearn, and Stryker (1966).

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 23

their therapists held the least hope of ultimate recovery evaluated themselves most highly and saw themselves most consistently.

With the perceptions the children had of how their mothers, fathers, best friends, and therapists saw them as the independent variables, and the children’s self-descriptions as the dependent variable, the partial and multiple correlation coefficients for each category were calculated. The risk of imputing cause to the correlational data was hazarded in the hope of penetrating to the sources of the self-descriptions. The multiple R’s for the categories “very good” and “good” were identical .52’s; thus, these four independent sources accounted for about twenty-five percent of the variances in the self-concepts of the children in these categories. For the

“poor” and “very poor” categories, the multiple R was .98; here, then, virtually all the variation in self-concepts was accounted for by the four variables: perceptions of mother’s, father’s, best friend’s, and therapist’s view of them. When the partials were examined, only the perceptions of best friends were found to be independently significant in the “very good” and “good” prognosis categories, being +.33 and +.43 respectively. In the “poor” and “very poor” category, the partial r of perception of best friend and self-description was —.79. The partial r of perception of therapist and self-description was +.97.

We believe these data can be understood as reflecting differential commitment to a “disturbed role” on the part of the various categories of subjects. No less than others, the deviant is a role-player in search of an identity which he seeks to create and to keep stable. Behavior disturbances in a child can be seen as role-making behavior in the process of developing a self-concept, that is, as a manifestation of the process through which the child finds, builds, tests, validates and expresses a self sufficiently coherent and organized to be counted as a reflection of a

disturbed role.

Such behavior disturbances will take on the meaning we have attributed

to them when they are rewarded, for then the disturbed child may integrate them into the process of identity-formation. And the reinforcement may lead him to form an identity as a disturbed child and to value that identity positively. The child thereby becomes heavily committed to an identity which requires the performance of a disturbed role. The greater the commitment, of course, the less likelihood that the therapist will succeed in altering the identity. Conversely, therapy can be expected to be relatively successful among the uncommitted—children who are still finding, building, and validating a self.

The rationale of this argument can be seen in the research data of . Schwartz, Fearn, and Stryker (1966). Assume, as seems reasonable, that the children most committed to a deviant identity will be deemed by their therapists as having poor prognosis for recovery; and the children least committed to a deviant identity will be judged to have a good outlook. The question, then, is what significance is to be attached to the findings that the committed have more positive self-concepts, have less variability

24 THE RESEARCH HYPOTHESES AND DESIGN

in their self-concepts, and regard much more of the content of their self-concepts as shared by their therapists, than is true of the uncommitted?

The relatively poor self-concepts and the greater variability of selfconcepts of the uncommitted children suggest that they are in an important degree anxious about themselves. It is this very anxiety which makes them good prospects for therapy, for therapists may use it as the basis of a program of positive reinforcement, rewarding behavior that is not disturbed while at the same time serving to reduce anxiety. On the other hand, the relatively good self-concepts and their lesser variability among the committed children suggest that they are not at all anxious about themselves.

The therapists, given their Freudian perspectives, are likely to be both permissive and supportive. They are thus in the position of reinforcing the very behavior they wish to alter. By supporting the behavior of the child role-player, and in so doing removing what little anxiety the child might feel about himself, the therapist defeats his own purpose—for there is little possibility of rewarding alternative patterns of behavior by the reducing of anxiety, if there is little or no anxiety in the first place. In other terms, the

therapists validate the identity that reflects the role of disturbed child. Now let us assume that we rightly interpreted our multiple and partial correlations as reflecting the influence of significant others on self. Almost

all of the variation in self-concepts of the children committed to the disturbed role is accounted for by their relationships with their therapists; and,

if the foregoing analysis is correct, the therapist reinforces the disturbed role and so makes even more unequivocal the children’s conception of self in the disburbed role. The selves of the uncommitted are less determined by

a small set of significant others; this implies that in their case there is a variety of entrees into the self and so a greater range of sources of possible change in self-concepts. It becomes, under this circumstance, both more difficult for a deviant self to solidify and easier for non-deviant elements in the self to become salient.

The Reformulated Hypotheses In the light of the exigencies of our research and also of the experience gained through related work after we had first planned our study, we realized

both the need and the opportunity to reformulate our aims. We can state these reformulated aims in terms of three sets of hypotheses we hoped to test.

The Hypotheses on Quality and Variability of Self-Concepts

If, as has been postulated (see p. 15, above) identities are imperatives to behavior, then differences in behavior should be at least in part a function of particular identities. It should be possible to discern, given relevant

and reasonably valid instruments to assess the self, differences in the qualities attributed to self by those whose behavior is delinquent and those whose behavior is not. Assuming that teachers’ characterizations of given students have some behavioral basis, then those boys the teachers’ classify as “good” and “bad” should evidence differences in qualities of the self. But what differences? Should “good” boys’ self-concepts be more positive than those of “bad” boys? Or the reverse? Suppose one picks up the

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 25

apparent implication of the work of Schwartz, Fearn, and Stryker (1966): that those who were most committed to deviance evaluated themselves more favorably than did those who were less committed to deviance. Should

we expect this finding to hold in the comparison between the nominated ‘“‘so0d” and “bad” boys, the “bad” boys enjoying more favorable selfconcepts than the “good” boys? Our tentative answer is “no.” The difference in the two cases is precisely in the degree of commitment premised on a deviant identity. The problem children with “poor” prognoses, we would argue, are heavily committed. They have been processed in an institutional setting, and they have more or less unconditionally accepted the reflections of themselves as deviant. They are, in other words, in a late stage of the process of developing a deviant identity. Except for the boys who, comparably, have been processed by the legal system, we would

not expect “bad” boys to have moved so far along the way to a deviant identity as to have reached a point of no return. We would expect them to be still sifting and sorting responses to self in their attempts to develop a stable identity. Again, we would not expect a “bad” boy to have developed a relationship with another who supports and reinforces his deviance in a way analogous to the disturbed child’s relationship with his therapist. Consequently, we would not expect “bad” boys to evaluate themselves more

positively than do “‘good” boys. |

Should, then, the reverse be true: “good” boys evaluate themselves more

positively than “bad”? If one’s identities are shaped in interaction with others, then the answer to this question would lie in the quality of the responses of those others. On the assumption that those classified by teachers as “bad” boys in some sense earn that reputation, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some of the others with whom “bad” boys interact will evaluate them comparatively unfavorably. “Good” boys, on the other hand, will presumably be faced with others’ evaluations of them which are more or less uniformly positive. If, then, others’ evaluations are reflected in self-evaluations, the self-evaluations of the “bad” boys ought to be less positive than those of the “good” boys. This expectation is supported by the studies of Reckless, et al., and by the pilot work in Detroit (Schwartz and Tangri, 1965). On the basis, then, of such empirical results and our reasoning based on them, the hypothesis to be tested is: predicted

delinquents will differ from predicted non-delinquents in the degree to which their-self-evaluations are positive; and the former will be the less positive.

Figure 1 is intended to diagram this hypothesis and its relation to both our theoretical framework and the literature. The vertical axis refers to quality of self-concept, the continuum running from positive to negative. The horizontal axis refers to the degree of commitment to a deviant role, ranging from low to high. “Good” boys presumably appear low on the commitment dimension, thus their self-concepts are comparatively positive.

“Bad” boys supposedly are in a position further along the commitment dimension yet are not completely committed; thus their self-concepts are comparatively negative. Full-fledeved delinquents, labelled and processed by the police and the courts, are presumably heavily committed to the deviant

26 THE RESEARCH HYPOTHESES AND DESIGN

role and their self-concepts should be more positive than those of the other

two categories. The process depicted in this figure need not be in one direction: those in the middle could move in either direction.

Figure 1: Quality of Self-Concepts as a Function of the Deviant Role-Making Process ES

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Should one category of boy vary more than the other in self-concept? For reasons already given, we would expect the self-concepts of boys of whom delinquency is predicted to vary more than those of predicted nondelinquents, and we hypothesize this relationship. If “good” boys do indeed receive fairly consistent feed-back from others, this should be reflected in a limited variability in their self-concepts. If, on the other hand, “bad” boys receive at least some negative feed-back from others, their self-concepts ought to te the more variable. Again, we interpret variability in self-concept

as a function of commitment to a deviant role, in the manner indicated in Figure 2. The thoroughly committed deviant, by this reasoning, should demonstrate the least variability in self-concept in comparison with either the uncommitted or the moderately committed. This, of course, an inference we have drawn from the research on the children presenting behavior problems.

The Hypotheses on Secondary Others

The corollary to the proposition that primary-group socialization is insufficient to produce conformity to the norms of the larger, impersonal society is that representatives of the politically powerful, the deviancedefiners, i.e., so-called secondary others such as the teacher in the school system, must serve as socializing agents if potential deviants are to be effec-

tively inoculated against deviance. Stated as a hypothesis: the probability of effectively controlling deviance is increased when the potential deviant is committed to carriers of impersonal, conformity-demanding norms.

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 27

3,

Figure 2: Variability of Self-Concept as a Function of the Deviant Role-Making Process

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But, as we argued earlier, these carriers must be of a particular kind: they must insist on conformity to norms and at the same time sanction violation of them. We hypothesize an additional qualification: the secondary other must not inadvertently reinforce deviance. This is a prime implication of the finding of the close relationship in children with poor prognoses between their perception of their therapists’ view of them and their own view of themselves.

In the context of our research, the only available representative of the institutional order of the larger society is the teacher. Our hypothesis is,

then, that the teacher will have greater impact on the predicted nondelinquent than on the predicted delinquent. Our evidence of impact, as in the study of disturbed children, will be the correlation between perceptions of the teacher’s evaluations of “good” and “‘bad” boys and the same boys’ self-evaluations.

Teachers are not the ovly representatives of the larger institutional order with access to boys: others, too, may serve as its agents of socialization. This fact must be -torne in mind in cons‘dering the significance of our data to the secondary other hypothesis. Our use of teachers was not a matter of choice. Given the need to choose one kind of secondary other, however, it makes sense to choose teachers: more adolescent boys will have extensive contacts with teachers than, for instance, with policemen or ministers.

The Hypotheses on Masculinity A frequent theme in the literature on delinquency relates such behavior

to difficulties in becoming an adult male in American society. So. for example, Toby (1966) suggests that juvenile deviance grows out of the frustration boys feel when they do not perceive themselves as moving

28 THE RESEARCH HYPOTHESES AND DESIGN

toward a fully adult role. Parsons (1947) finds the major source of delinquency in our society in the dominance of mother in the socialization of the young. Cut off from father by virtue of the remoteness of father’s place of work, the child will see mother as exemplar of morality, source of dis-

cipline and object of identification. Expected to become “manly,” but closely tied to mother, the boy has no assurance that he is a representative and recognizable specimen of his sex. Consequently, he rebels against. any impulse suggesting femininity and exaggerates any which would symbolize masculinity. Since mother is the agent of the “good,” goodness becomes feminine and badness masculine.

Cohen (1955:164-165) argues that the social world of the middle class accentuates the circumstances Parsons describes. Miller (1958), on the other hand, locates the “masculinity problem” principally in the lower class. Assuming that problems associated with developing into an adult male are in fact re!ated to delinquency, the role of social class in that relationship becomes an important question.

Cross-cutting the question of social class is another: precisely what is the nature of the problem of role acquisition? Has it to do with acquiring

a role as an adult or as a male? One can be masculine in the sense of

being a hard-working, stable, dependable husband-father; to be masculine

in this adult sense is to te a “breadwinner.” One can also be masculine in the sense of being sexually active, a hard drinker, a gambler; to be masculine in this male sense is to te a “swinger.” Presumably, the two meanings that can attach to masculinity are incompatible; yet for the most part the literature does not distinguish between them.

This distinction is made, however, by the denizens of Tally’s Corner (Liebow, 1966) who offered status as swingers as the rationalization of failure as breadwinners: they were too much male, they said, to be adult. Cohen and Short (1958) make the distinction directly relevant to delinquency. Discussing the middle-class delinquent boy, they suggest that he tries to establish his identity as an adult but finds the conventional, the respectable, the responsible criteria of adult status denied to him. Hence he seeks to symbolize his maleness by irresponsible, hedonistically-oriented behavior.

If such theories are valid, their validity ought to be reflected in the content of the self-concepts held by subjects judged to be potential delinquents and their predicted non-delinquent counterparts. The former ought to reveal their problems in developing a masculine identity by the way they respond to instruments designed to measure the self; they should be

demonstrably different from the latter in the qualities they attribute to themselves. The hypothesis to be tested is that subjects judged to be potentially delinquent will differ from those predicted to be non-delinquent in the degree to which their self-concepts reveal concern with and difficulties centering upon the development of a masculine identity. If the subjects judged to be potential delinquents suffer from problems of masculinity, then does the apparent significance of mothers to their selfconcepts as revealed in the Detroit data shed any light on the sources of these

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 29

problems? Do mothers by being perceived to hold views of their sons which explicitly or implicitly question their masculinity either create or exacerbate the problems their sons must face in becoming men? Our hypothesis is that perceptions of mothers’ views of self will structure the

self-concepts of those predicted as delinquent and the content of their self-concepts will reveal concern with masculinity.

And, as noted earlier, assuming both the content of self and the significance of mother in shaping this content, this significance may then be the product of mothers’ insistent demands, the effect of which is to emasculate the sons. Alternatively, it may be a function of the sons’ wish to return to the womb in the face of external rebuffs. The Modified Research Design

Just as did our theoretical orientation, our research design took form in the course of a succession of hindrances and restrictions. Thwarted in our early efforts to work through the central school administration, we ultimately secured, as we have said, the complete cooperation of one high school and the partial cooperation of another in a major Midwestern city. The city itself had a population of roughly 450,000 in 1965 when our study began. Its selection as a research site was largely a matter of convenience, but it did have the demographic characteristics requisite to a study of delinquency in which class and race were to be the major variables. According to the 1960 Census, the Negro population of the city amounted

to 15 percent of the total. Sample survey data from a study undertaken at the time we were beginning our own work showed that approximately | 5S percent of families in the city had incomes of under $3000, and another

1.3 percent had incomes ranging between $3000 and $3999. According to a study in 1965 (Taeuber and Taeuber, 1965), the city is residentially among the more segregated cities of the north, and one of the few in which residential segregation has increased in recent years. Historically, migration

to it has flowed from the middle south, a pattern which continues to the present, significant numbers of the in-migrants being Appalachian whites. The city is not heavily industrial; its economic base is largely light industry and commerce.

One of the two schools to which we gained entry is located in the section of the city with the highest incidence of conventional indicators of social disorganization. The area it serves is just off “downtown,” lower-class, as would be surmised, and heavily populated by blacks and by southern white migrants. Although the school draws from the entire city, its student body accurately reflects this local area: of approximately 2500 students, about one-third are Negro.

The second school serves an upper middle-class white population. Its enrollment is approximately 1,850 students. Its character is perhaps best expressed by a single fact: some four-fifths of its graduating classes go on to institutions of higher learning.

From the two male student bodies we drew the subjects of this study. Students in the two institutions ranged in age from 12 to 19. Within restric-

30 THE RESEARCH HYPOTHESES AND DESIGN

tions (noted in the next chapter), data were gathered from all available male students in the lower-class school, numbering 398. Hence these subjects do not constitute a sample in any technical sense. On the other hand, the 49 subjects in the upper middle-class school were a random sample, stratified by age, of all the enrolled males.

The makeup of each school being what it was, we were able to compare white and black students with each other in the lower-class school and we could compare white students across class lines by comparing students from the two schools. We could not, however, compare lower-class blacks with middle-class blacks, having none—for our efforts to work in schools with available cohorts of middle-class blacks unfortunately failed.

We intended at the outset to use age as a principal control in our analysis, in order, for one thing, to gain some idea of the time dimension in possible peer dependency and, for another, to see whether dependence on secondary

others developed through school careers. By and large we had to forego these analyses. In the first place, in the lower-class school from which most of our data were drawn, selective processes separating students from school at the age of 16 made non-comparable our in-school subjects under 16 and in-school subjects over 16. In the second place, the number of subjects we were able to secure in the school was insufficient to permit age

comparisons to any real degree of refinement. Thus, for the most part, our analysis concerned boys in the age range from 12 to 16. We did, however, make occasional and incidental use of our data on boys over 16 for whatever enlightenment they offered.

According to our original plan, we were to use the teachers’ ratings of boys as “good” or “bad” more or less incidentally rather than centrally. But when it turned out that very few of the students in either school appeared on police records, the teachers’ ratings, by default, took on increased importance. In the end, we used their ratings as our indicator of potential deviance: those they labelled as potential delinquents we called “bad” boys and those they did not so label we called “good.”

Is there any reason—other than sheer necessity—for believing that teachers will in fact select accurately the very boys who will get into trouble with the law as delinquents, and those who will not? Is there, we must ask, any validity in these predictions by the teachers?

Such evidence as exists favors the conclusion that there is reasonable validity in teachers’ predictions. While the data may te subject to a variety of criticisms (Tangri and Schwartz, 1967), and while precise proportions are impossible to determine, neverthe'ess, as the follow-up studies of Reckless, et al., (1962) showed, teachers do predict future police contacts with reasonable accuracy. Khleif (1964) presents evidence and cites still other evidence that this is indeed true. After all, teachers are likely to represent the norms of middle-class society and thus to view unacceptable behavior

patterns with alarm. Undeniably, they have considerable opportunity to observe students’ behavior, albeit under the constraints imposed by the school system. One may argue that precisely because they must gather their

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 31

evidence in a situation of constraint, their prognoses of future delinquency

will be accurate. (One could account for the greater frequency of false negatives on these grounds. )

We employed the teachers’ classification into “good” and “bad” boys throughout our analysis. Home room teachers rated each boy assigned to them, the vice-principal and his counselling staff rated all the boys and we required agreement between teachers and counselors on the ratings, eliminating from all analyses those on whom they disagreed.

As we have reported, it was only at the lower-class school that it was possible for us to secure teachers’ ratings. Consequently, we have no category of middle-class “‘bad” boys, and could make no comparisons involving them. While we included a middle-class white category in our analyses (Chapters VI through IX), its use was limited by its “impurity.”

Our limited economic resources permitted us to interview relatively few

mothers. Of the mothers of white “good” boys, the largest group, we selected for interviewing about 30% — 69 in all. Similarly, we selected about 40% of the white “bad” boys’ mothers, or 37. We wanted to interview many more of the black mothers, since there were fewer of them, and we selected

about 65% or 35 of the mothers of “good” boys and 70% or 20 of the mothers of “bad” boys. These were drawn from the total pools at random. White interviewers interviewed white mothers and black interviewed

black. The interviewers were all women trained in social work and the techniques of interviewing. They failed to reach some of the mothers who,

even after several daytime calls, (the interviewers justifiably refused to call at apartment houses after dark) were never found at home. And some mothers flatly refused to be interviewed at all. The final totals were: Total

Number Not Com-

Number Selected Refusals Home pleted

1. Mothers of white “good” boys 223 69 11 7 51

2. Mothers of white “bad” boys 90 37 15 4 18 3. Mothers of Negro “good” boys 56 35 6 6 23 4. Mothers of Negro “bad” boys 29 20 3 5 12 In this review of our research and its orientation we have given something of a natural history. Such a procedure seemed in this instance to be particularly appropriate, for developments in both ideas and design carried us away from our original plans. Changes in ideas called for corresponding changes in design—and vice versa—for changes in design necessitated by externally-imposed restrictions reshaped our hypotheses at least to some

extent. This is a distressing eventuality, yet one familiar to anyone who has undertaken a study requiring the cooperation of others.

32 THE RESEARCH HYPOTHESES AND DESIGN

CHAPTER IV

INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT

OF SELF

Social psychologists have found the measurement of self an elusive and demanding task. Ruth Wiley (1961) charges that both the techniques and research designs employed to measure self in past years are inadequate,

since, for one thing, neither was based reasonably on a_ theoretical

perspective. A symbolic interactionist may discuss significant symbols and

significant others, as crucial to self-development, but he may define the self operationally by means of a checklist of traits or adjectives—operations which frequently bear no relation to his original theoretical perspective.

The Process of Symbolic Interaction From symbolic interaction theory comes the premise that one does not

experience the self directly but rather through his interpretations of the gestures directed toward him by others. In other words, from the perspective

of symbolic interaction the meaning that one attributes to himself as an object is a function of (but not identical with) his perception of the mean-

ings that valued others attribute to him as an object. This core notion,

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 33

which is derived from G. H. Mead (1934), poses perplexing problems to those interested in theoretically justifiable measurement. We chose to define self by a semantic differential instrument (Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum, 1957), arguing that the liaison of Mead and Osgood is theoretically justified.?

There is a good deal of similarity between Mead’s notion of the development of self and Osgood’s “representational mediation process” (ibid., 5-9). To Osgood, a significate is any stimulus which regularly produces a reliable pattern of behavior. Presented contiguously with the significate, the neutral stimulus acquires an increment of association with some part of the

total response made to the significate and this effect indicates that the neutural stimulus has become a “sign” of the significate. The response

(r,,) elicited by the sign represents some part of the total response

evoked by the significate and is one that has the properties of a stimulus (Sy) to the individual. Consequently, the ru-s» is the meaning to him of the sign, and that meaning is a predisposing factor in the eventual overt response. Furthermore, other neutral stimuli can be associated with the sign, once established, and they, too, can take on part of the meaning of the sign. This “second order” process produces assigns. ‘““The vast majority

of signs used in ordinary communication are what we term assigns—their meanings are literally ‘assigned’ to them via association with other signs rather than via direct association with the objects signified” (ibid., 8). Although we have never seen a unicorn we could no doubt describe one

for we have seen pictures of it, been told about it, read of it, and it has taken on certain portions of mediating reactions already associated with primary signs, such as “horse.” The rn-S,, or partial response serving also as a stimulus can be viewed as an anticipatory response phenomenon. Covert at this point, it leads to a later overt response. The implication is that the meaning of a sign is not only the response that the sign or significate elicits, a response dependent on prior pairings with other signs and significates; it is also a function of the modes of behavior which the individual has learned that usually follow from the sign stimulus. A child may pair the words “hot,” “burn,” and “no” with fire, each word gaining some

of the meaning of fire. If he withdraws from fire, part of the reaction of avoidance will have come from other words associated with fire. Fire has meaning as a symbol and the symbol will evoke responses similar to those evoked by the significate. But the word “explosion” may have built into it associations from “fire,” ‘“‘no,” “hot,” “burn,” and so on. In that sense, “explosion” is an assign, as is “democracy,” or “love,” or “me.”

Developed from symbolic interactionist ideas, Hulett’s model of twoperson interaction (Hulett, 1965) makes the “fit” of Mead and Osgood 1 The semantic differential is not an adjective check list like those covered in the blanket criticism made above: it vests on an analysis of meaning comparable to Mead’s. Further, it differs from the routine adjective checklist precisely in that it derives meaning from an organization of subjects’ responses rather than from a priori considerations of

Investigators.

34 INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT OF SELF

quite clear. If one assumes a need on the part of A to enlist the aid of B in reaching A’s goal, then Hulett proposes the sequence:

Covert Instrumental Environmental A) Motive—— Rehearsal———> Act Event—————> R,, 1. own role 2. other role 3. definition of situation 4. generalized other

B) M—->-C.R.— LA. E.E.>R, A’s motive causes him to want the aid of B. The problem facing A, then,

is to motivate B, and so before directing any symbols to B, according to Hulett, A engages in a covert rehearsal of events to come: he assesses his own role, considers the situation from the point of view of the other based on a definition of the situation and taking into account the demands of the generalized other. This covert rehearsal then is a process of decision wherein

A, the gesturer or sender, decides upon the symbols to use in order to motivate B. Covertly, A presents those symbols to himself. His response

(tm) is based upon experience with those symbols, paired with either

significates or other symbols in the past. His response, however, also func-

tions as a covert stimulus (S,) to act. In Hulett’s model, the ry-Sn

of the covert rehearsal leads to behavior designed to motivate B to act in a way complementary to A’s action. A’s act is an instrumental act, leading, if the covert rehearsal was valid, to the motivation (M) of B, who then goes through his own frm-Sm process in covert rehearsal. B’s resulting instrumental act, 1.A., in the form of significant symbol then produces an alteration of A’s environment (environmental event). B’s symbol produces a response in A, and A’s response serves as a stimulus to himself

since goal response, Rg, is attained. Similarly, A’s R, is a significant symbol to B who responds and then acts to achieve his own Rg. Thus A

and B each go through fyrS, processes (point at which meaning is attributed to stimuli from which overt responses emanate) at two discrete points: covert rehearsal and environmental event.

It can be argued that the self arises in such situations as Hulett describes.

One learns the meaning of self by seeing himself through the eyes of others. The self is, then, composed of the roles one plays and one’s judgment of his performance of them, based upon how well he succeeded or was rewarded in his interaction with others while playing the roles. It is fair to say, therefore, that the self-concept is built of the roles and role performances as one understands the quality of the performances from the point of view of the other.

Clearly, success in the interaction sequences depends upon shared meaning. To school boys their performance as students depends upon the judg-

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 35

ments of their teachers. To the extent that the meanings the teachers bring to the school situation are like the students’ meanings, interaction between them is relatively smooth. But if those meanings do not coincide, interaction is made difficult and hence unpleasant. The argument is heard frequently that lower-class children are ill-equipped for school, and fail; they have less experience than their middle-class counterparts with the meaning of symbols, or at least very different experience. As a comnsequence, their interaction with teachers is frustrating and they all too often fail. A long sequence of failures tends to produce in the students poor and defeated self-concepts.

What Osgood has contributed to theory is his specification of the process whereby meaning is learned. If the self is regarded as an object, the symbols

that stand for the self can be paired with all sorts of signs. If “self” is paired frequently, for example, with success, then the meaning of self may come to include in part an increment of the signs “good,” “successful,” and

so on. Such pairings take place in interaction units such as the one formulated by Hulett. If the response to self (tm) is “good,” then “good” should serve as s, for behavior that would differ from the behavior where “bad” is the tm. The self is an object to which individuals attribute meaning, and one can expect variations in behavior based on that meaning.

Methods of Measuring the Self The important problem faced by social psychologists dealing in self theory has to do with the measurement of the meaning that individuals attribute to themselves as objects. Sociologists have not dealt sufficiently with that meaning and its dimensions. Cohen, Reckless, and others pointed to the poor self-concepts among delinquents, but there are no measures of the self based upon the symbolic interactionist’s point of view. Osgood’s semantic

differentiation offers a method of measuring self in the same terms in which the self is conceptualized.

We need to know the meaning individuals attribute to themselves, the dimensions of that meaning, and, most important, the interaction that produced it. With respect to the latter, we need to know the relationship between an individual’s perception of the evaluations of himself made by some other and his own evaluation of himself. For example, are the meanings of “me” that I attribute to “me” more or less like my perceptions of the meaning of “me” that my father or my mother hold? And do I perceive that significant others use the same dimensions of meaning for “me” that I use for “me’’? The semantic differential (SD) developed by Osgood et al is an instrument to measure the process of representational mediation which, to repeat, can be seen as a specification in terms of learning of symbolic interactionist theory. It has the advantage of being easily mass-administered, it minimizes the error in measurement introduced by variation in verbal fluency, and it is an instrument which fits the theoretical demands of our position.

36 INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT OF SELF

The SD measures the connotative meaning that individuals attribute to a variety of stimuli. The technique elicits responses on bipolar scales with contrasting adjectives at each end, such as:

1234567

Fair — — — — — — — Unfair Word concepts can be rated on a series of such scales. Each point on the scale is given a “linguistic quantifier.” It is assumed that “on the basis

of a great deal of prior experience in encoding, the terms ‘extremely,’ ‘quite,’ and ‘slightly’ . . . have been associated with more or less equal degrees of intensity of whatever representational process happens to be elicited, and therefore, that the sign combinations ‘extremely X,’ ‘quite X,’ and so forth will elicit a response of the quality X and of the intensity given by the quantifier” (Osgood et al, 1957: 26-30). Early studies of meaning aimed at determining its dimensions. Osgood selected some 76 polar adjective pairs from Roget’s Thesaurus and asked one hundred college students to rate twenty word concepts on the 76 scales. Then he calculated and factored correlations between scales over all subjects and arrived at three major dimensions: (a) Evaluation, (b) Potency,

and (c) Activity (ibid., pp. 31-75). Subsequent studies using subjects ranging from schizophrenics to normals revealed the same structure; it is confirmed also in many cross-cultural situations. Some variation by situa-

tion has been noted: for example, Komorita and Bass (1967:241-244) factored data based on evaluation scales only. Considerations of method may account for the differences between their three factors—functional value, hedonic value, and ethical value, and Osgood’s set of three. Other studies introduce various things to be rated and yield different factors but in all the bulk of the evidence supports a three-factor structure of meaning, although the variability in studies is great enough to warn an investigator

that he should factor-analyze his own data. Interestingly, Madden (1961: 183) found that three-factor ratings of the semantic differential were excellent predictors of what items on the MMPI an individual would check as

pertaining to himself. Thus, there is at least tangential evidence that a semantic differential measurement of self has some concurrent validity in personality tests.

The fact remains, however, that a number of studies using the semantic differential do show factor structures different from Osgood’s Evaluation, Potency, and Activity. This, with the further fact that we wished to mea-

| sure self-concept in lower-class Negroes and whites led us to conclude that we would have to construct a new instrument. In addition, we needed to use the data from the semantic differential in a novel form: we wanted to locate the meaning attributed to the concept “I am,” but we also wanted each subject to rate himself from the perspective of some other person opposite whom he played a role. This raised another important issue: is the factor structure used by a subject for self-description identical with the factor structure that the subject believes certain significant others are using in assessing him?

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 37

The First Form of the Self-Concept Instrument Substantial problems in developing a semantic differential measurement of self are to determine first the bi-polar scales to be used and then what concepts are to be rated on them. Osgood’s guidelines are relatively vague on these points. He asserts that the scales should be relevant to the concept being judged and also relevant to the rater. Triandis shows that “relevant scales make rating easier,” that relevant scales produce more variance

(1958:321-378), and that such variance involves less random error (1959:221-225).

What concepts would suit our purpose best? We began with the assumption that self has two components—roles and evaluations or assessments of oneself in those roles—and that, furthermore, the bi-polar adjective scales would measure the assessments. The problem was in determining the roles, or “situated identities,” to be rated.

, On instruments of this sort, some word or phrase stimulus to be rated normally appears at the top of a page; but since people play different roles, we chose to permit our subjects to place their own stimulus there. This was done in the following manner: A booklet of twelve pages was put together. The first page was given over to instructions, but it also served to conceal the eighteen pairs of adjectives representing Osgood’s three factors, which were printed on each of the pages which followed. The top inch of each page was cut so as to form a kind of flap. While the adjectival scales were covered, the series of flaps was exposed and subjects were to be instructed to write one answer to the question, ““Who am I?”

on each of the flaps. That was expected to produce ten statements of role or situated identity. The last page was headed, “I am.” In this way, we hoped

to learn something about the situated identities used by adolescent boys to define the self. We hoped, too, to see which of those identities seemed to share more or less variance with a global self-assessment, “I am.”

This instrument was administered to forty twelve-year-old white boys from working-class families in a small city in the fall of 1965. They were in their own school classrooms, instructions were given orally and several examples were presented on the blackboard. In our experience, this procendure is adequate and somewhat more effective than giving simple written instructions.

The results were both interesting and perplexing. The range of the boys’ role statements about themselves was not very wide and none was able to

use all ten pages. Most frequently, six role statements were made but some boys made as few as two and some as many as eight. The role statements were put in various ways, as well. Some wrote, “a baseball player,” others, ‘‘a football player,” and others, “a ball player.” Some wrote, “a son,” others, “my father’s son,” and still others, “my mother’s son.” Some wrote,

“a pupil,” others, “a 6th grader,’ and so on. The numbers of roles and the descriptions varied, making statistical analyses very difficult. This format had a second drawback: it was time-consuming and when data are to be gathered during regular school hours time becomes important.

38 INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT OF SELF

Finally, our instrument provided no way of determining specific significant others. That is, if a boy selected as a role statement, “son,” we had no way of knowing the extent to which his response was based on his perception of his mother’s assessment of him as a son, or his father’s assessment, or both. Since one of our major interests was the significance of given others, this was a very serious drawback.

Permitting subjects to choose which role statements to apply to themselves

seemed the best method of solving the problem of the relevance of the concepts to be rated, but it immediately became clear that the method created more problems than it solved. The data in such form were too idiosyncratic to be useful in cross-group analyses and certainly they were difficult, if not impossible, to organize for the purpose of multiple regression and partial correlation. We wanted to determine how much of the variance

in “I am” assessments was shared by all of the role assessments taken together and also to learn through partial correlations specifically which role assessments, taken individually, shared most of the variance with the comprehensive self-assessment, as an indication of “key” roles. But the data were not in such form as to yield that information.

Before proceeding, it would be well to face an issue confronting investigators who seek to test theoretical ideas in an empirical context, namely, the “fit” of operational procedures to theoretical constructs. Our conception of self sees the self as a complex set of identities, arranged in a hierarchy of

salience. Given what we can take to be generally true of boys in this society, and given the way in which our boys responded to the first pretest situation, we had at least some reason to believe that the prospective identi-

ties indicated above are very likely to be incorporated into the selves of our subjects and are very likely to be reasonably salient. We had no way of knowing, however, whether a given identity was, in fact, a part of a given subject’s self, or whether that given identity was “‘sufficiently” salient to make a real difference to him. Of necessity we relied on the reasonable probability that we would not be led too far astray by an instrument using the particular identities we chose.

A related issue arose in the fact that others from the standpoint of whom our subjects were asked to rate themselves were only a small sub-set of the others potentially significant to our subjects. Again, there are a priori reasons

for believing that to samples of boys at large mother, father, best friend, boys (in general) and girls (in general) are meaningful categories of others and likely to be (among) the most significant available others. Further, these more or less exhaust the roster of their available primary others. But clearly we were not equally justified in arguing that the category, “teacher,” exhausts even approximately the class of their possible secondary significant

others. We can, we believe, reasonably argue that of all conceivable secondary others—representatives of the larger institutional social structure—

teachers are more likely than any other to be important to more boys in the age range with which we are dealing.

These issues are of obvious methodological importance to our research. We did not solve them; we did the best we could and kept them firmly in

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 39

mind when we confronted the general implications of our particular empirical findings.

In view of considerations of time, concern over locating significant others and arriving at data in statistically manageable fashion, we decided upon a

new format. In the initial study the most common role statements were related to position in the family, friendship relations—best friend, same-sex

and cross-sex—and pupil positions. There was also a clear concern over oneself as an athlete but we believed that a boy’s performance in that respect would be a determinant of his general repute with other boys.

The Self-Concept Instrument, Revised

Consequently, in a second pretest, the following seven concepts were rated: 1. I am; 2. As a son, my mother thinks I am; 3. As a son, my father thinks I am; 4. As a student, my teachers think I am; 5. As a friend, my

best friend thinks J am; 6. Boys think I am; and 7. Girls think I am. In this way, the stimuli required each boy to assess himself in a given role from the perspective of a relevant other or others. Moreover, the instrument

as revised broadened from the locating of relevant concepts to a fuller analyzing of the dimensions represented in the bi-polar scales themselves. Since, in our final analysis, we were going to draw respondents from several groups which we expected would vary in some fundamental ways, we conducted the second pilot study on a new and larger sample. Our eventual aim was to produce a single instrument which would be relevant to white and

Negro boys ranging in age from 12 to 19 years, lower-class as well as middle-class.

During the late fall and early winter of 1965, we got in touch with a large inner-city junior-senior high school in a medium-size Midwestern city,

whose students were about two-thirds white, one-third Negro, and were given permission to conduct our research there. A careful listing of all male

students was made, their race, age, and address recorded, as well as the presence or absence of fathers in the household, birth order of each boy, number of siblings and occupation and education of the head of the household. Also each boy was rated by his home room teacher as either “good” (unlikely to come in contact with police or courts) or “bad” (very likely to do so). The assistant principal in charge of discipline concurred in all but eleven of the judgments and these cases we eliminated from the research.

The school had an enrollment of 2,489; of those, 1,251 were males, 260 of whom were in special classes for the retarded. That left a pool of 991 male

students in the normal I.Q. range, 374 being black and 617 white. There were further losses. The absentee rate on any given day in this inner-city school was between ten and thirty percent, depending in large part on the weather. We made more than ten return trips to the school to catch boys who had been absent on days when we had administered our instrument. The total number of usable cases was, to be sure, a non-random sample of boys in the school but we made a serious effort to see that it was representa-

tive. That was done by including white and Negro boys in all the age categories from twelve to eighteen years, some of whom the teachers rated as “good,” some as “bad.” The sample included about 23% of the eligible

40 INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT OF SELF

white boys and about 29% of the eligible Negroes. In the total of 254 boys who were enrolled and able to complete the forms, there were 101 white “good” boys, 44 white “bad” boys, 85 Negro “good” boys, and 24 Negro “bad” boys.

We administered the same instrument in March of 1966 to a random sample stratified by age of 119 white boys, aged from 12 to 19, in a school in an upper-middle-class community. Because of absences, we received 119 usable questionnaries from 125 boys selected for the sample. However, the

boys were not classified as “good” and “bad” for, as we said earlier, the principal refused to permit the teachers to rate them, insisting that no boys in his school would ever find themselves in contact with the law.

In the lower-class school, the instrument was administered to the boys in groups of no more than fifteen at one time, in order that close watch could be kept of problems the subjects might encounter. The boys within normal I.Q. range seemed to be able to do this task with relative ease.

Each of the seven concepts on the instrument—“I am,” “As a son, my mother thinks I am,” and so on—was rated on thirty-four pairs of polar adjectives with seven-point scales interposed between the pairs.

The adjectival pairs were all drawn from Osgood’s early study based on the Thesaurus. They were:

better than most—worse than most good—bad happy—sad right—wrong perfect—imperfect careful—careless

unselfish—selfish nice—mean

friendly—unfriendly changing—unchanging

kind—cruel hard-working—lazy clean—dirty gentle—violent beautiful—ugly tame—wild successful—unsuccessful quiet—noisy

important—unimportant interesting—uninteresting

useful—useless on time—late

honest—dishonest wide awake—dreamy

innocent—guilty calm—excited easy—difficult brave—cowardly strong—weak powerful—powerless

smart—stupid boyish—girlish

big—small sick—healthy

To prevent the order of the adjectives from affecting the outcome, we arranged them randomly and we alternated the valued poles in successive pairs, so that if scale one read “good—bad,” scale two read “stupid—smart,” as a device to eliminate response sets, or at least to catch them. Other test items were randomly inserted throughout the test booklets in order to provide us with more information about the boys and to serve as distracting devices to eliminate response sets on the semantic differentials.

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 41

The Four Factors After the semantic differential data were gathered from the middle- and lower-class groups, and coded, a factor analysis of them was performed across all respondents on each concept, seven factor analyses in all. A varimax rotation to simple structure was performed, and factors were ex-

tracted which had eigenvalues of 1.00 or greater. In each of the seven factor analyses, four main factors were extracted. Items with factor loadings

of .40 or greater were kept if they appeared on the same factor in at least five of the seven factor analyses. For example, if “good-bad” loaded .40 or more on an evaluation factor for the concepts “I am,” “As a son my mother thinks I am,” “As a son, my father thinks I am,” “As a student, my teachers think I am,” “As a friend, my best friend thinks I am,” then the item “good-bad”’ was retained.

From each of the factor analyses, four similar factors emerged which after visual inspection we named “Evaluation,” “Activity,” “Potency,” and “Interpersonal Qualities.” Items associated with a factor in fewer than five of the seven analyses were eliminated by simple inspection. Tables IV:1-

IV:7 show the factor analyses; the summaries and items kept for each factor for the instrument are given below. In all, twenty-three items of the original 34 pairs were included to represent four factors: Evaluation (6 items): good-bad, important-unimportant, better than mostworse than most, smart-stupid, right-wrong, beautiful-ugly.

Activity (8 items): wide awake-dreamy, careful-careless, tame-wild, hard working-lazy, on time-late, violent-gentle, quiet-noisy, calm-excited.

Potency (4 items): strong-weak, powerful-powerless, brave-cowardly, bigsmall.

42 INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT OF SELF

TABLE IV:1

Factor Loadings of Items, Four Factors, All Boys, Stimulus: “I Am”

Item I II Ill IV good-bad 55 13 .29 25 better-worse .60.30 12 .O7

Interpersonal

Evaluation Activity Potency Qualities

perfect-imperfect 47 19 .06 A5 beautiful-ugly 4255141329AS.O9 successful-unsucc. 27 important-unimp. .6719 1620 22 46 12 useful-useless .40

smart-stupid 58 19 18 21 right-wrong 465636 interesting-dull 1635 28 09 16

careful-careless 1815.61 27 16 hardworking-lazy 52 21 23 gentle-violent .20 47 08 36

tame-wild 14 21 quiet-noisy 24 22 59 42 .00 11

on time-late 07 SI 18 24 wide awake-dreamy 14 6523 .2714 08 calm-excited 12 41 boyish-girlish .0822 O07 46 18 brave-cowardly 19 .69 7 strong-weak .2634161478 17 powerful-powerless .69 18 friendly-unfriendly .20 15 17 43 .67 kind-cruel 15 35 24 clean-dirty 14 24 14 .60 honest-dishonest 18 1908 .O3.46 61 nice-awful 23 39 healthy-sick 10 13 .26 5 big-small 25 .O7 .38 .Q3 changing-unchanging 12 02 .O3 00 easy-difficult innocent-guilty13 .2638 0913 23 33 31

unselfish-selfish 1534 32 happy-sad 29 .08 .262318

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 43

TABLE IV:2

Factor Loadings of Items, Four Factors, All Boys, Stimulus: “As a Student, My Teachers Think I Am”

Item I I III IV good-bad 53 42 - .O7 24

Interpersonal

Evaluation Activity Potency Qualities

better-worse 33 .26 03 27 kind-cruel 44 .26 11 33

successful-unsucc. 50 21 08 19 important-unimp. .20.16 34 38 06 useful-useless 49.69.20

smart-stupid 7 13 | 18 27 right-wrong 3652331328 interesting-unint. 36 17 15

careful-careless 27 43.06 19 AS 22 hardworking-lazy 42 41 gentle-violent 27 .46 .O3 29 tame-wild 21 .66 04 A7

quiet-noisy 21 58 09 .O3 on time-late OS 44 09 22 wide awake-dreamy 1419 1 28 14 calm-excited .10 45 O05 brave-cowardly 7175 73 .61.26 27 strong-weak 15 powerful-powerless 15 11 70 18

big-small 10 10 43 .00 happy-unhappy 33: 10 21 41 friendly-unfriendly 26 02 11 56 clean-dirty 162518 12 52 honest-dishonest .20 05 .63 nice-awful 29 31 11 54 healthy-sick .O5 24 .26 48 perfect-imperfect 32 12 04 14 unselfish-selfish36.20 0825 11AS 32 beautiful-ugly .03

innocent-guilty 19 25 13 24 easy-difficult 341129.0O171835 changing-unchanging 12 boyish-girlish .06 12 21 35

44 INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT OF SELF

TABLE IV:3

Factor Loadings of Items, Four Factors, All Boys, Stimulus: “Girls Think I Am”

Item I II Il IV good-bad better-worse.64 .6825 .1012 10 17 23

Interpersonal

Evaluation Activity Potency Qualities

happy-unhappy .62 27 13 17 imperfect-perfect SO .O1 22 32 kind-cruel 33 32 25 28 beautiful-ugly 58 12 38 O09 friendly-unfriendly 50 08 17 30

on time-late 12 .67 04 7 wide awake-dreamy .20 .63 .O7 04 calm-excited .08 43 16 16 important-unimp. 6122 .0842 4518 20 smart-stupid 52 right-wrong 40 .30 42 .26 interesting-unint. 591914714 41 12 brave-cowardly 28 17 ) strong-weak 21 25 1013.80 18 powerful-powerless Sl. .O9 big-small .06 10 56 10 clean-dirty 47 21 11 successful-unsuc. 1 10 2145 40

useful-useless 44 08 34 48 honest-dishonest .26 22 07 59 easy-difficult 3228.O3 16 .40 55 careful-careless 45 23

nice-mean 32 18 .20 61 hardworking-lazy 19 .36 22 48

gentle-violent 16 17 .O2 .67 tame-wild .O7 31 .O3 .60 unselfish-selfish 25 23 08 12 innocent-guilty 15 32 19 29 changing-unchanging 07 OO 22 .O3

quiet-noisy .O7 36 12 25 boyish-girlish 13 18 29 14 healthy-unhealthy 25 21 37 35

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 45

TABLE [V:4

Factor Loadings of Items, Four Factors, All Boys, Stimulus: “As a Son, My Mother Thinks I Am”

Item I Il Il IV good-bad 2 .26 .O9 happy-unhappy 40 35 .0638 27

Interpersonal

Evaluation Activity Potency Qualities

kind-cruel 4954370808 35 beautiful-ugly 24 24 smart-stupid 61 1409 21.24 29 right-wrong 3 41 careful-careless 31 38 14 21 hard working-lazy 11 .O7 59 .06.33 28 tame-wild 12 57

quiet-noisy AT084961 157.O4 on time-late 08 wide awake-dreamy .08 .62 26 AS brave-cowardly 21 18 .69 17 strong-weak 20.20 121383 16 powerful-powerless .16 11 big-small 12 21 52 O05 better-worse 32 08 .08 .64 perfect-imperfect 24 13 .06 0

friendly-unfriendly 29 13 clean-dirty 171819 18.617

successful-unsuc. 35 17 18 7 important-unimp. 561315.20 24 61 41 useful-useless 26 honest-dishonest14 0836 27 06 .20 46 56 easy-difficult

nice-mean 17 48 08 48 gentle-violent 10 47 09 49 healthy-unhealthy 06 .20 .33 45 unselfish-selfish 21 34 14 21

innocent-guilty 2919110418 32 changing-unchanging 16 00 interesting-dull 3837 24 31 39 19 27 calm-excited 10 boyish- girlish .0O 05 37 19

46 INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT OF SELF

TABLE IV:5

Factor Loadings of Items, Four Factors, All Boys, Stimulus: “As a Friend, My Best Friend Thinks I Am”

Item I II Hil IV good-bad 44 28 9 .33 beautiful-ugly 46 13 23 17

Interpersonal

Evaluation | Activity Potency Qualities

important-unimp. 62 19 24 32 smart-stupid .64 .O9 21 24

right-wrong .62 27 23 5 interesting-dull 41 27 .30 23

careful-careless 48PS) 44 19 18 hardworking-lazy 16 .06 25 gentle-violent 04 25 37 tame-wild 040871.65.00

quiet-noisy 23 53 0 17 03 on time-late 16 26 15 wide awake-dreamy 33 4527 3015 11 calm-excited 16 44 brave-cowardly 23 12 16 18

strong-weak 29 .O9 .80 11 powerful-powerless 17 Al 77 .06 big-small 17 21 47 04

healthy-sick AS125 .08 50 37 better-worse 35 59

perfect-imperfect 18 14 52 friendly-unfriendly OO 19 00 14 .67

kind-cruel 32 .20 36 18 16 .64 41 clean-dirty 04

successful-unsuc.26 3015 07 5 08.64 56 useful-useless honest-dishonest 10 38 .08 90 easy-difficult 02 27 145 1 nice-awful .08 47 10 boyish-girlish 15 20 0202370918 changing-unchanging 02

innocent-guilty 27 3235 02 28 24 happy-sad 36 .26 unselfish-selfish 16 22 09 22

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 47

TABLE IV:6

Factor Loadings of Items, Four Factors, All Boys, Stimulus: “Boys Think I Am”

Item I II Il IV better-worse happy-unhappy 74723 .2619 29 36 35

Interpersonal

Evaluation Activity Potency Qualities

perfect-imperfect 34Al 1720 11 14 16 beautiful-ugly 47 important-unimp. 2720 22 smart-stupid 55.66351923

good-bad 42 43 18 25 kind-cruel 32 5414525 honest-dishonest .0643 54

innocent-guilty4.20 125 12 07 18 right-wrong 45 careful-careless 29 4709 3254 18 nice-mean 17 45 hardworking-lazy 13 41 13 38 gentle-violent 19.64 5805 .02.29 39 tame-wild 12 quiet-noisy 15 55 09 .O1

on time-late .O5 53 31 25 wide awake-dreamy .20 47 3213 16 calm-excited 21 5 .20 boyish-girlish 17 .O7 42 19 brave-cowardly 25 14 .70 19 strong-weak 22 21 .O9 .83 14 powerful-powerless .O'7 81 07 big-small .02 12 54 02 healthy-sick 16 AS 42 48 friendly-unfriendly .30 1318 19 61 .64 clean-dirty 25 23 successful-unsuc.40 4214 .1625 1148 42 useful-useless easy-difficult 27 37 10 .43 interesting-dull 3510120739 changing-unchanging 15 25 .06 unselfish-selfish .20 .20 22 14

48 INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT OF SELF

TABLE IV:7

Factor Loadings of Items, Four Factors, All Boys, : Stimulus: “As a Son, My Father Thinks I Am”

Item I II Ii] IV good-bad 585236 beautiful-ugly .3008 12 36 26

Interpersonal

Evaluation Activity Potency Qualities

interesting-dull 50 22 17 37 21 29 happy-unhappy 32 49 quiet-noisy 23 46 19 17

on time-late 15 .69 14 24 wide awake-dreamy 21 .6621 3014 16 calm-excited 13 44 boyish- girlish 27 08 72 44 .26 15 brave-cowardly 21 23 strong-weak 19 18 .76 14 powerful-powerless 11 17 75 27

big-small 03 7 55 05 better-worse 50 16 14 5

perfect-imperfect 33 23 18 47 friendly-unfriendly 22 27 23 65

kind-cruel 42 43 19 427 clean-dirty 21 16 10 successful-unsuc. 38 14 13 .60

important-unimp. .63 29 24 40 useful-useless 39 14 24 .64 honest-dishonest 31 13 .O9 .66 smart-stupid 1 23 .30 41

easy-difficult38 24A5 28 23 13 54 right-wrong careful-careless .20 59 19 42 41

nice-mean 28083845A8 4 hardworking-lazy 14 49 gentle-violent O1 .33 14 .68

tame-wild OO .46 04 7 healthy-sick 08.2313 9 changing-unchanging 04 29 17 OO

innocent-guilty unselfish-selfish 31 35 22 37 13 04 31 32

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 49

Interpersonal qualities (5 items): friendly-unfriendly, honest-dishonest, clean-dirty, useful-useless, successful-unsuccessful.

To summarize what we learned about the structure of meaning of selfconcepts: first, the categories one uses for self-description are very like the categories that one believes others use in perceiving him. Second, as has been found in other research, more than the three dimensions, Evaluation, Activity, and Potency are needed in person perception. We added the factor,

“Interpersonal Qualities.” Finally, our technique appeared to permit us to approach the measurement of self-concept from a sound theoretical base.?

The final form of our semantic differential was administered to the boys in groups of approximately 100 in the schools where the pretests were

conducted in October 1966. (We doubted that between March 1965 and October 1966 many boys recalled our instrument and their first responses). Again, in the lower-class school we went through the procedure of having boys labelled “good” and “bad” by their teachers and the assistant principal in charge if the discipline. And again, the principal in the middle-class school refused to permit such labeling. The totals were as follows:

White “good” boys, 12-15 years N = 223

White “bad” boys, 12-15 years N = 90 Negro “good” boys, 12-15 years N = 56 Negro “bad” boys, 12-15 years N = 29 White “good” boys, 16 years + N = 106 White “bad” boys, 16 years + N = 34 Negro “good” boys, 16 years + N = 24 Negro “bad” boys, 16 years ++ N = 20 White middle-class boys, 12-15 N= 49 White middle-class boys, 16 + N = 70 Total N = 701

Other Measures We included in the final instrument several other sets of items. One was

that designed by Short, Rivera, and Tennyson (1965:56-67) to tap dif* We tried in a similar way. to measure the self-concepts of boys in special classes whose I.Q.’s ranged between 50 and 80. They were all unable to complete our semantic differential forms, poor facility in reading being the handicap, of course. We then tried to develop a non-verbal measure of self-concept. Toward this end we had the boys identify themselves in pictures. A picture of a white boy whose mother and father were smiling warmly at him, and a picture similar but where the parents were threatening him, and a matching set with a Negro boy in the foreground were drawn for us. We asked each respondent to look at the two pictures and tell us which boy was most like him, which he would like to be, which was the nicest boy, and to tell us what the parents were saying to the boys. This proved unsatisfactory in several counts. First and most important, we had to consider the idea of the development of the self concept in a non-verbal population or one with low verbal abilities. What affect does poor language ability have on the development of self-concept? Second, if the answer to that is not known, then how does one build a measure of self-concept based on theory? The fact is that our initial attempt with pictures was only exploratory. Many of the boys could nct respond to the questions at all. Moreover, the theoretical issues were vague and not directly pertinent. Therefore, we decided to eliminate those boys from the study.

50 INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT OF SELF

ferential perceptions of open legitimate and illegitimate opportunity struc-

tures (Table IV:8). One of our interests was in the interaction between perceived lack of access to legitimate opportunities, self-concept and poten-

tial delinquency, to probe into which we used the Short, Rivera, and Tennyson scale. TABLE IV: 8

Perception of Legitimate and [legitimate Opportunities Items * Legitimate Educational Opportunities

1. In our area it’s hard for a young guy to stay in school. (—) 2. Most kids in our area like school. (+) 3. Most of the guys in our area will graduate from high school. (+) 4. In our area, there are a lot of guys who want to go to college. (+ ) 5. College is too expensive for most of the guys in the area. (—) 6. As far as grades are concerned, most of the guys in our area could get through college without too much trouble. (+) Legitimate Occupational Opportunities

7. Its hard for a young guy in our area to get a good paying honest job. (—) 8. Most of the guys in the area will probably get good paying honest jobs when they grow up. (+) 9. For guys in this area honest jobs don’t pay very well. (—) 10. Guys in this area have to have connections to get good paying jobs. (—)

11. In this area it’s hard to make much money without doing something illegal. (—) Integration of the Carriers of Criminal and Non-Criminal Values

12. Some of the most respectable people in our area make their money illegally. (+-) 13. The police in this area get paid off for letting things happen that are

against the law. (+)

Criminal Learning Structures

14. There are connections in this area for a guy who wants to make good money illegally. (+ ) 15. Young guys can learn a lot about crime from older people in the area.

(+)

16. There are adults in this area who help young guys make money illegally. (+-) Visibility of Criminal Careers

17. In this area there are some people who make their living by doing things that are against the law. (+) 18. Some of the young guys in our area will be making a living someday

by doing things that are against the law. (+) * Signs in parentheses indicate the “valence” of a “True” answer relative to the opportunity structure area indicated. The items are taken from Short, Rivera, and Tennyson (1965).

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 51

Elite Criminal Opportunities

17. (A) A lot of these guys who make money illegally do not operate alone. They have to answer to people above them who are calling the shots. (—)

18. (A) A lot of these guys won’t be operating alone either. They'll have to answer to people above them who’ll be calling the shots. (—)

19. A guy from this area has a chance of really making it big in the rackets. (+) 20. None of the people who make big money in the rackets live in this area. (—) Adult “Clout”

21. Not many really successful people live in this area. (—) 22. Adults in this area haven’t much clout (pull). (—) Adult Helpfulness

23. There are adults in this area who help young guys get jobs. (+ ) 24. Adults in the area do a lot to help young guys keep out of trouble. (+)

The principal of the middle-class school who, it will be recalled, would not allow any of his students to be labelled “bad,” also refused to permit us to use anything on the scale beyond item 10, a neat demonstration of the differential power of social class to ward off labels.

The final instrument also contained items which served only as breaks in routine or as distracters, and, of course, we did not analyze them.

The Interviews with Mothers

Because this project arose in part out of our interest in the style of mother-son interaction, we conducted a series of interviews with the mothers

of a sample of our respondents. The interviews were relatively brief and had two parts. The first part consisted of questions designed to elicit the extent to which the mothers saw agencies of control of their sons outside of the family as legitimate and the extent to which they encouraged their sons to be controlled by such agents, for example, teachers or policemen. For example, we asked if the boys belonged to groups such as Boy Scouts, community centers, church groups, boys’ clubs, and the like. We asked if such facilities were available and, if so, if mothers encouraged their boys to join. We also asked about the extent to which the mothers spent time with their sons in church, on vacations, shopping, and so on. We asked if neighbors, policemen, other adults, teachers, relatives, or youth leaders tried to take authority away from parents; at what age boys should be able to

take care of themselves and whether they should be permitted to live at home as long as they like after leaving school; if the mothers made rules for them about watching TV, going to church, drinking, smoking, doing household chores, dressing and grooming, driving, dating, and studying; and the extent to which they left the boys with relatives or others while they were away or at work. We were most concerned with the mothers’ demands for conformity.

52 INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT OF SELF

The second part of the interview was the administration of the Parental Attitude Research Instrument developed by E. A. Schaefer and R. O. Bell (1958:339-361). Devised to reveal modalities of mother-son relationships possibly relevant to the thesis of masculinity (as reviewed in Chapter III) it seemed to us an instrument ideally suited to our purpose. It consists of twenty-three five-item scales. Test-retest and internal consistency reliabilities have in the past proved satisfactory. With each item the mothers were asked to “strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree.”

“Strongly agree’ was scored 1 and “strongly disagree” scored 4. The twenty-three scales with sample items were:

1. Encouraging talking: Children should be allowed to disagree with their parents if they feel their own ideas are better.

2. Fostering dependency: A good mother should shelter her child from

life’s little difficulties.

3. Seclusiveness of mother: The home is the only thing that matters to a good mother. 4. Breaking the child’s will: Some children are just so bad they must be taught to fear adults for their own good. 5. Martyrdom of the parent: Children should realize how much parents have to give up for them. 6. Fear of harming the baby: You must always keep tight hold of baby during his bath for in a careless moment he might slip. 7. Marital conflict as inevitable: People who think they can get along in marriage without arguments just don’t know the facts. 8. Strictness: A child will be grateful later for strict training. 9. Irritability: Children will get on any woman’s nerves if she has to be with them all day. 10. Excluding outside influences: It’s best for the child if he never gets started wondering if his mother’s views are right. 11. Deification of the parent: More parents should teach their children to have unquestioning loyalty to them. 12. Suppression of aggression: A child should be taught to avoid fighting, no matter what happens. 13. Rejection of the mother role: One of the worst things about taking care of a home is a woman feels she can’t get out. 14, Equalitarianism: Parents should adjust to the child some rather than always expecting the children to adjust to the parents. 15. Approval of activity: There are so many things a child has to learn in life there is no excuse for him sitting around with time on his hands. 16. Avoidance of communication: If you let children talk about their troubles they end up complaining even more. 17. Inconsiderateness of husband: Mothers would do their job better with the children if fathers were more kind. 18. Suppression of sex: A young child should be protected from hearing about sex.

19. Ascendancy of mother: If a mother doesn’t go ahead and make rules for the home, the children and husband will get into troubles they don’t need to.

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 53

20. Intrusiveness: A mother should make it her business to know everything her children are thinking.

21. Comradeship and sharing: Children would be happier and better behaved if parents would show an interest in their affairs. 22. Speeding up development: Most children are toilet trained by 15 months of age.

23. Dependency of the mother: There is nothing worse for a young mother than being alone while going through her first experience with a baby. Summary

The bulk of our first year’s work was the development of a measure of self-concept that met the theoretical demands of symbolic interactionism. The semantic differential proved to be the most useful instrument for this purpose. Our pilot work led us to a four-factor instrument: Evaluation, Activity, Potency, and Interpersonal Qualities. To our instrument to measure self-concept we added the Short, Rivera, and Tennyson scale of perceived

legitimate and illegitimate opportunities and these two instruments plus evaluations of the boys by teachers and principals constituted the major portion of our data. Brief interviews were conducted with a sample of the boys’ mothers.

Before we report the data gleaned by our instruments, however, we will present a description of one of the high schools in which we conducted our research. Its unique character, as it turned out, had a crucial bearing upon our findings.

54 INSTRUMENTATION: THE MEASUREMENT OF SELF

CHAPTER V

AN ANOMALOUS SETTING: A LOWER-CLASS SCHOOL

Of the two high schools from which we drew subjects of our research, the middle-class school is a fair representative of its kind. But the other, the lower-class high school, is an anomaly whose peculiarities entered decisively into our data. We describe it here as we knew it; two years later, under a new principal, it was changing into a typical lower-class city school. Lower-class schools are viewed almost without exception as inadequate and inferior to middle-class schools in nearly every respect. To mention just

two accounts: Kozol’s Death At An Early Age (1967) is probably the most poignant description ever written of the doom and defeat of the very

young at the elementary level of schooling, while Friedenberg (1963) finds little of value in secondary schools, no matter what social class they serve.

The School as a Bureaucracy In the face of such substantial testimony as this, the conclusion seems inescapable that schools serving lower-class children fail at educating. Their

students do not learn to read and write, nor do they acquire marketable ,

skills in high school.

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 55

A second conclusion is that lower class schools are controlled by a rigid bureaucracy. Given very high rates of turnover of teachers and of absenteeism of both teachers and students, the only hope for the school administrator appears to lie in the vigorous enforcement of rules and regulations covering every conceivable circumstance of school life. But the cost of the increasing bureaucratization is high. To keep the organization stable, each discovered infraction of the rules must be promptly dealt with—a response that usually produces renewed efforts at enforcement and a constant proliferation of new rules. The result is a continuing escalation of bureaucratic practices so that in the end the greater share of the institution’s resources and energies are committed to the organization’s maintenance, leaving the smaller share for the business of educating per se.

To make so oppressive an environment more tolerable, students and teachers alike may seek out possible means to subvert the system. This, of course, leads to more bureaucratic structuring to plug the loopholes and eventually to more absenteeism and turnover of teachers and more absenteeism and more behavior problems among students—the very things which the bureaucratic organization was supppsed to prevent.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, the students exercise little control over the running of schools or even over their personal relations with their teachers. Appearances to the contrary, student councils, usually consid-

ered to be evidence of participatory democracy, are a sham. If academic defeat of students in lower-class schools is then coupled with inablity to control and manipulate through legitimate channels, one may expect as possible consequences: sabotage and rebellion, including the physical violence often found in schools in large metropolitan areas; massive apathy which sets in when officials move with force or are expected to do so; and escape by dropping out. The case materials which follow, taken from field notes made while we were doing research in a lower-class school, indicate that redistributing power and authority in the organization may have favorable effects upon academic performance and rates of deviance. The Setting: The Lower-Class Academic High School

The two schools in which we did our research have identical formal structures. Each has a principal and two vice-principals, a dean of boys and a dean of girls and a counseling and guidance specialist; both schools are officially defined as academic, as opposed to technical schools, and their

academic departments have heads. But the schools function in very dissimilar ways.

As we have said, the middle-class school conforms to the stereotype. Clean, bright, orderly, it functions “by the book” and over eighty percent of its graduates go on to institutions of higher learning.

We conducted our research chiefly in the lower class school. This institution departs from the pattern typical of its genre in, for one thing, a tend-

ency toward debufeaucratization and a willingness to extend power to students informally. Moreover, the principal is a man of great charisma.

56 AN ANOMALOUS SETTING: A LOWER-CLASS SCHOOL

So deeply, indeed, does his personality impress itself upon the school that the institution is to be understood in terms of the man.

Thirteen years before our research began this was a technical school. Its neighborhood population was changing from middle-class Jewish to lower-class Negro and lower-class white, the latter being primarily southern

white migrants. A new technical school was being built and the director of personnel of the school system (we will call him Mr. Wood) was seeking a principal for the old one, which was now to become an academic high school. Although Mr. Wood interviewed a great many candidates, he was not able to interest any in what must have appeared to them to be a custodial job in a locality characterized by high rates of delinquency, crime, illegitimacy, drug traffic, and the like. But Mr. Wood himself saw the school as a challenge, an opportunity to make secondary education a meaningful and useful experience while, at the same time, achieving a personal reputation for success, and he ended by taking the principalship himself. He was still principal when we began our research there.

Mr. Wood entered the school with a clear sense of mission. He is a man who believes that education, to be relevant, should equip young people with real and marketable skills. Products of the school system, accord-

ing to him, should become hard working, taxpaying individuals who raise “normal” families, have no need of welfare and who participate fully

in the life of the community. At the same time, he holds that little is sacred in the traditions of public education administration. Graduation, for

example, he regards as an arbitrary cutting point in the educational

scheme, with very little functional meaning. The issue, he insists, is not certification but competence to do meaningful work. When a student gains that competence, whether it take two, three, or five years, at that point if he chooses, his education ought to terminate without his being labelled a “drop-out”’—or the new euphemism—an “early school-leaver.” Competence is a motif that pervaded the school.

Another notable phenomenon is coupled by Mr. Wood with the drive for competence. He rarely refers to the students as “children” or “kids.” He uses the word “people” to refer to the student body, just as he uses it to refer to his faculty. The point is that the students are viewed by administration and faculty as in the process of becoming adult, functioning members of the community, near-adults and responsible persons in their own right.

The outlook on inner-city schools and their students of the normal products of teacher training institutions is so far from Mr. Wood’s ideal that he faces a very difficult problem in finding teachers. They have to be willing to work in the inner city in a non-custodial, untraditional setting but also

they must accept fis view of the student body completely. An absolute dictator, he insists on his own style and ideology, tolerating no variation whatsoever; and he has won. The personal charisma of the man among dedicated teachers—those who care about the students more than about traditional methods—impressed us on our first visits to the school. His

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 57

charisma in the eyes of the students, too, is obvious. He is known to them, not simply as “Mr. Wood,” but more frequently as “Bid Daddy.” He calls himself “Big Daddy,” the students do, and so do some of the faculty and

he has installed an enormous oil painting of himself in the school’s library—which gave us a sense of “Big Brother” 2s much as of “Big Daddy.” His entire life is invested in his school, his working day often extending to eighteen hours, his working week to seven days.

The students are fully aware that Mr. Wood cares deeply about them. He knows that some of them are victims of neglect, maltreatment and even brutality at home, and his concern took on practical manifestations. During

the course of our work, for example, he was trying to acquire an old house nearby to use as a residential center for students who needed a home that was not overwhelmingly demeaning. He was even willing to have them declared his personal wards. This kind of effort and feeling sets him apart from other administrators, and so pervades the atmosphere of his school as to make the stereotype of the lower-class school completely inapplicable.

When we selected Mr. Wood’s school it was for its location and the composition of its student body; we had no way of knowing that it would differ in any way from other lower-class schools and indeed it seems at first glance to fit the picture of all inner-city schools. It is dark and dingy, the students are obviously not middle-class in speech, dress, or manner, and in general the institution seems to be not well managed. Two phenomena are absent which are common not only to lower-class schools, but also to many middle-class schools: no police officer is anywhere in evidence nor are there any of the customary ubiquitous hall monitors. Observing these departures from the expected led us to question the school administrators. Originally we intended to focus our work on essentially so-

cial psychological data on self-concept, but, as it turned out, the information Mr. Wood and the vice-principals could give us was of the utmost

importance to our understanding of the school. Indeed, the context in which our social psychological data were gathered proved to bear on the outcome of the study, although we did not realize it at the time. What appears to be an unusually under-controlled institution is, in fact highly and very cleverly controlled. Mr. Wood states that he is quite well

aware that in the eyes of his students, police authority is frustrating; it conveys to them the expectation that they will get into trouble and police authority, therefore, is indispensable. Rather than communicate those

expectations and thereby provoke the very behavior that he wants most to discourage, the principal himself asked for the removal of the school police officers. (Of course, Mr. Wood knows that a phone call will bring a police officer to the school usually in less than three minutes.) Actually, police have had to be called on very rare occasions and each time it has been because someone not enrolled in the shcool had intruded. As for the usual hall monitors and teachers posted in the cafeteria to maintain the peace by constant surveillance, their elimination was at the re-

58 AN ANOMALOUS SETTING: A LOWER-CLASS SCHOOL

quest of students. The principal agreed to remove them on a trial basis several years ago and has never needed to replace them.

While one may wonder how control is maintained and justifiably ques-

tion the extent to which the students are typical of those in inner-city schools, we must point out, first, that the school is in reality, very closely controlled, but by informal rather than formal bureaucratic techniques, and, secondly, that the students are not atypical in any respect. There are, as we have noted, approximately 2,400 students enrolled at this school. At any given time from 600 to 800 are Negro. The remaining students are lower-class whites, most of whom are from migrant families from Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi. They are transient, essentially rural, and marked by other characteristics which normally make for serious problems in northern school systems. Of great signifi-

cance is a statement made to us by one of the vice-principals: that in addition to being introduced to unfamiliar codes of time and space, children such as these must be taught the role of student. The point is, of course, that secondary school teachers expect of their students certain forms of behavior which most high school students—but not migratory youth—would have learned in the primary grades.

To the migrant students, on their side, school and teachers are unpredictable. The school could bring about the socialization of these migrant, often ghetto, children in any of several ways. Typically, conformity is gained by fiat: “You will do such and such.” In Mr. Wood’s school, how-

ever, reasons for rules are explained, and most important, obedience, even to the unfamiliar rules of time and space, is always related to what is being done at the time. Therefore not only are the curriculum, teaching

and ideology made to match the students’ need of competence rather than of certification but rules of the school bureaucracy are adjusted to the principal’s complementary demand for competence.

Equalitarianism is explicit throughout the institution. The Negro students, as far as we could see, are counseled in exactly the same manner as whites; they are not guided away from academic programs and into vocational training nor advised against choosing certain careers. The conviction that their disadvantaged past has to be overcome by special effort made on their behalf, though not apparent to us at first, proved to be a strong element of school policy.

In any month of the school year as many as thirty percent of the white students leave and are replaced by new ones. But one-third of the student body is a large and steady core of Negro students from families of what Walter B. Miller (1958:5-19) termed the stable lower class. And since they are a constant in the school population, the teachers, administrators, and counselors find it more rewarding to devote a major share of

their attention and energy to them. Indeed, we realized that the staff was animated by a clear and explicit mission to “save a Negro’—an attitude which proved to have an important bearing on our findings.

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 59

Most of these students live in an area characterized by the city’s highest rates of crime, welfare cases, aid to dependent children, divorce,

desertion, and so on. It is the habitat of minor thieves and prostitutes, and of all forms of gambling. Much of its poor housing falls into the slum category and it is surrounded by heavy industry and railroad yards. To add to the school’s liabilities: its doors are open not only to students from the school district, but to others from all over the city who have

either dropped out or been thrown out of other schools. Mr. Wood, though in no way obliged to accept them, on principle will not deny them access.

By the same token, Mr. Wood on occasion takes on very unpromising teachers—teachers who for various reasons are not able to keep permanent positions in other city schools—and puts at their disposal every

possible resource to help them get the job done. Under his guidance most of them, as well as a sizeable number of what would be thought to be hopeless students, do not simply survive the public school system but actually do well. Mr. Wood’s eécentricity includes a view of self as

redeemer; one cannot help but be impressed by the fact that many of his “people” are indeed redeemed.

Control by Personal Relationship Controlling such a body of students naturally is a serious problem to the school administration. Rather than by direct bureaucratic directives, control is actually maintained through primary and quasi-primary relationships between administration, teachers, and: students, which the principal has to

teach his staff to manage. He also has to create and maintain structures to constrain people to behave along the lines he prescribes.

These relationships are based on reciprocity, a system of personal debts and credits. If a student finds himself in some difficulty with a teacher, for example, the vice-principal not infrequently will take advantage of the situation by deciding in the student’s favor. In that way two things obviously are accomplished: first, the student incurs a debt to the vice-principal while

the vice-principal gains a credit with the student which he may collect when he wishes, and second, by transactions of this nature, strain between principal or vice-principal and teachers is probably increased.

With regard to the first point, students may settle their obligations, for example, by providing the principal or vice-principal with information, in

advance, about, say, a coming fight in the auto shop or a rumble at a

ball game. This may be defined by some as “finking” or “‘copping out,” but on the other hand, putting the administration in their debt may appear to the students as using power to control their environment. The students in fact, tend to be over-eager to collect credits. Thus when one day the vice-principal announced on the school public address system that a girl’s blue purse containing identification was missing from the cafeteria, and requested that it be brought to his office as soon as possible, no fewer than nine blue purses were turned in in an hour! This was obviously a technique for gaining credit with the administration.

60 AN ANOMALOUS SETTING: A LOWER-CLASS SCHOOL

This system of reciprocity, depending as it does upon the willingness of

the administration not only to have students in their debt, but to be indebted to them as well, is the chief mode of social control. Possibly the arrangement gives the administration a much more intimate knowledge of

the code and activities of the students than they could gain if the organization were more formally bureaucratic.

The administration, too, uses the system to its own advantage. At their discretion the faculty and staff ignore rules held to be of low priority in return for appropriate behavior on the part of the students. As a matter of fact they sometimes dispense with the less urgent rules in advance of the quid pro quo. In this way the model differs from a typical model of learning reinforcement. At the same time however, the scheme can be used by the students as well, for power is no longer unilateral. In our view, this policy goes far to reduce the sense of powerlessness which is thought to be a ground for alienation from school.

In sum: the use, on the one hand, of very informal non-bureaucratic debt-credit relations in a kind of social exchange and, on the other, of bureaucratic rules to establish debt-credit relationships, is effective with a population of students who seem not to respond in a direct fashion to urban, secondary, or bureaucratic modes of social control. Indeed, these peculiar relationships between students, staff, and faculty make the school a pseudo-Gemeinschaft.

This general bargaining with traditional demands for control and conformity has the effect, however, of causing particular strain between faculty and students. The teachers feel that their authority may be subverted by the administration’s personal deals with students. Yet they know that teaching in this kind of school under more normal circumstances where the teacher is invested with most of the authority and responsibility for enforcement

of the rules is difficult at best. In Mr. Wood’s school, the teachers’ responsibility was great but their authority was kept small by the administra-

tion’s bargains with the students. The problem of responsibility without authority might normally be thought to create such enormous strain as to bring about high absenteeism and turnover of teachers. But such is not the case. In more traditional inner-city schools absenteeism, high rates of turn-

over, low quality of teacher, and the like, are common and the added role strain created by this school’s administrative policies might be ex-

pected to aggravate those conditions. Why does this not happen? ,

Mr. Wood, realizing that his teachers face all the problems of an innercity school, devised techniques to deal with them. In the first place, he simply tells his teachers that in his opinion classroom teaching itself is difficult enough at best and so they should refer all problems of behavior to the administration. In the second place, he and both vice-principals spend a good deal of their time “cooling out” the faculty. They drink great quanti-

ties of coffee with the teachers in their lounge, listen continually to complaints and generally permit themselves to be targets of the frustration and hostility which the day’s work can generate. Thus, in reality, not only does

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 61

the administration keep the students under constant supervision: it supervises the faculty and provides it moral and emotional support.

Charisma and personal exchange seem to maintain morale among the faculty and to produce, as well, a generally high level of educational efficiency. Thanks to Mr. Wood, the school is remarkably responsive to the students’ as well as the teachers’ needs. For example: As an academic, not a

technical institution, the school provides minimal training in such things as auto repair. But realizing that more than that is needed—only a very few of the students go on to college—the administration established a wide variety of relevant training programs.

Impatient of red tape and the slow pace of “proper” procedures through the “right” channels and in some cases on his own initiative and almost single-handedly, Mr. Wood secured for the school a barber shop, a beauty shop, facilities for training dental and medical technicians, a shoe repair shop, a model cleaning and dyeing plant, and a facility for training restaurant

food handlers—and there are other examples. Some of the boys in the food handlers’ program have learned such refinements as what kind of wine goes with what kind of food and all are in great local demand on graduation. There is also the standard auto shop, but unlike most shops, its engines and training techniques are modern and the auto mechanics trained there easily find employment. A final example: a gas station located nearby was acquired by the school through enormous effort of the principal and is now a part of the school property. Service station management is taught there

and the station is open to the public, albeit at odd hours of the day. As long as this potentially troublesome school is quietly and efficiently run, the principal continues to have his way with both the school board and

the superintendent. The students, for their part, find they have more chance to “be” and “become” in a legitimate sense than is offered in the typical lower-class school. In short, in this school they find open to them two reward systems: they can control their environment through power and reciprocity and they can learn immediately marketable skills. The holding power of the school is thereby greatly fortified. Many students do not graduate but they become ready to drop-out.

Recognizing that the principal exercised enormous personal charm, and that we ourselves were clearly drawn to him, we checked our observations

with those of others who were at a distance and yet knew the school. And we found that the local merchants, for example, hold the principal and the students in high regard. As the community changed, said several of them, they feared for the safety of their shops but their fears proved groundless; they realize that the principal is in complete control of the students and vandalism is negligible. In addition, we learned that the officers of the juvenile bureau of the police department are delighted with the school

since, contrary to their expectations, it is not a troublesome place. In other words, our impressions of the school as one which is under control, though not by the customary bureaucratic methods, seems borne out by the

| experience of others.

62 AN ANOMALOUS SETTING: A LOWER-CLAss SCHOOL

These reassurances, however, did not mean that the school did not preSent us, as a research team interested in delinquency, with serious problems.

Our original intention was to relate measures of all our independent variables to measures of delinquency as indicated by police records. Every expectation about the community, the family lives of the students, and so on led us to expect the school’s rate of delinquency, as measured by police records, to be very high. But inquiry at the school as well as a search of the files of the juvenile bureau revealed its officially recorded rate to be remarkably low. In fact, there were fifty recorded cases in the twelve months prior to June, 1966. That represents only slightly more than two percent of the student body where we were expecting a rate of over ten percent. How can the discrepancy be accounted for?

There are several possible explanations. One is that the structure of the school and its capacity to implement social control somehow keeps the rate low. Another is that the school, because it meets the needs of the student by preparing him by way of occupational training to enter the community’s system of legitimate opportunities, has the effect of holding deviance at a low rate. But there is a third possible explanation, one having to do with the unique student-staff personal exchange: the delinquency rate apparently is kept low by the principal himslef.

Mr. Wood arranged with the juvenile bureau of the police department to bring students “in trouble” to him in most cases instead of to the police department. The police department is most willing to cooperate with him since it reduces their work load. The principal is then able to deal directly

with the student when he has been picked up for misdemeanors. Under such conditions the student incurs debts to Mr. Wood, over and above penalties the latter may mete out, penalties extending sometimes to corporal

punishment. But the adolescent, rather than face contact with the police would prefer to endure his principal’s rage. At the same time, the principal gains greater control over the offender than he would otherwise have, for both of them knew that he can always deliver him to the police and the juvenile court. This procedure is followed chiefly in the case of misdemeanors but occasionally even after felonies, such as auto theft. Once a student has been turned over to the principal, he can expect no aid from him whatever, should he offend a second time. This means, however, that the few cases which we found on the police record are not first offenders: the recorded two percent is made up of multiple offenders.

The important point here is that the principal acts in loco parentis, after the manner of middle-class parents who undertake to shield their adolescent child from legal processing and labeling. In effect, the school in this way serves to equalize the life chances of these students with those of middle-class students.

In the main, one concludes from the literature that lower-class adolescents are doomed, defeated, alienated—an outcome in which the schools play the dominant role by setting up obstacles to success. Here, however,

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 63

we encounter lower-class students being provided obstacles against failure similar to those with which middle-class adolescents are provided. These circumstances, as we shall show, had an unanticipated effect upon our research.

A Further Check: Perceptions of Opportunity If our analysis of the school’s character is reasonably correct, then it should have some measurable effects upon the students. And, indeed, when

we administered the scales developed by Short, Rivera and Tennyson (1965:67) to measure perception of the openness of the legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures to the students, we obtained some interesting evidence. In the Short, Rivera and Tennyson study, Negro lowerclass gang and non-gang boys’ and middle-class Negro boys’ perceptions are compared as are also lower-class white gang and non-gang boys and middleclass white boys’. “The ranking of the six race-by-class-by-gang-status groups on official delinquency rates corresponded more closely to ranking on perceptions of legitimate opportunities than to ranking on perceptions of illegitimate opportunities which is consistent with the assumption that 1llegitimate opportunities intervene after legitimate opportunities have been appraised and found wanting. Gang members perceive legitimate opportunities as available less often than non-gang boys, lower-class boys less often than middle class, and Negro boys, less often than white” (ibid., p. 56). As we have reported, the teachers assessed our subjects as either likely or

unlikely to have any contact with the law and the two categories were called “good” and “bad” boys, respectively. Recalling that the staff devotes its energies more to the black students than the white, we expected that:

(1) more “good” boys than “bad” see the system of legitimate educational opportunities as accessible to them;

(2) more Negro boys, “good” and “bad,” see that system as open to

them than do white boys, “good” or “bad”; :

(3) if the school actually does make a difference in the boys’ perception of legitimate educational opportunities, more of our Negro “good” boys see the system as open to them than do the Negro non-gang boys from Short, Rivera and Tennyson’s Chicago study;

(4) more Negro “bad” boys see the system as open than do the Negro gang boys from their study, while fewer such differences occur between our

white boys, “good” or “bad,” and their white boys, gang or non-gang. In making these comparisons, we risk the assumption that our “good” boys are roughly comparable to Short, Rivera and Tennyson’s non-gang boys to the extent that both groups were less committed to a deviant identity

than their gang boys and our “bad” boys. Table V:1 presents some of the relevant data. It is clear that more Negro

“good” boys see the system of legitimate educational opportunities as open than do Negro “bad” boys. While none of the six items shows

a significant difference, across all six items the Negro “good” boys

64 AN ANOMALOUS SETTING: A LOWER-CLASS SCHOOL

TABLE V:1

Perception of Legitimate Educational Opportunities of Boys, Aged 12-15, by ““Good”-“Bad” Category, and by Race Percent of Boys Saying Yes

In our area, it’s hard

White White Negro “Good” “Bad” ZNegro “Good” “Bad” Z

for a young guy to stay

in school. 23.9: 40.0 2.83** 20.8 30.8 = 1.01 like school. 47.8 34.0 2.26% 63.9 46.2 1.59

| Most kids in our area

Most of the guys in our area will graduate from

high school. 68.4 51.0 2.82** 75.0 61.5 1.25 In our area there are a

lot of guys who want to

go to college. 35.0 35.3 0 58.3. 57.7 0 College is too expensive

for guys in the area. 62.6 62.0 17 61.3 65.4 36 Most guys in our area would get through col-

- lege without too much

trouble. 44.8 40.0 83 54.7 30.0 46 * p< .05 ** p< .001

respond more favorably in six of the six cases (p < .02). In making the same comparison among white boys, we found significant differences between the “good” ones and the “bad” on the first three items: more “good” boys than

“bad” think that it is easy to stay in school and that most boys like school and will graduate; but on two of the college-related items the white “bad” boys were slightly more positive than the “good” boys. Over all six items,

the white “good” boys gave positive responses four of the six times, whereas it was six out of six among the blacks. Our black “good” boys also differ from the white “good” boys six out of six times (p. < .02), more blacks seeing the system of legitimate educational opportunities as open

than do the whites. Among the “bad” boys, the blacks differ from the whites again, more of them being positive about educational opportunities in five out of six instances (p==.11). The only reversal is that blacks see college as too expensive more frequently than whites do—a not unexpected finding.

In all, it does seem that more “good” boys than “bad” in our study are optimistic about educational opportunities and that more Negroes are optimistic than whites. The “good” boy-“bad” boy differences also add some validity to the teacher ratings.

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS : 65

TABLE V:2

Perception of Legitimate Educational Opportunities of Boys, by “Good’-“Bad” and Gang-Non-Gang Categories, and by Race Percent of Boys Saying Yes

White White White White Non-Gang “Good” Z Gang “Bad” Z

Hard to stay in school 21.5 23.9 35 52.2 40.0 1.62 Most kids like school 60.8 47.8 1.95* 32.2 34.0 29 Most will graduate 65.8 68.4 .30 32.2 51.0 2.59** A lot of guys in area

want to go to college 44.3 35.0 1.40 16.7) 35.3 2.75** College is too expensive 65.8 62.6 48 80.0 62.0 2.95** Most guys could get

through college 40.5 44.8 75 43.3 40.0 41 Negro Negro Negro Negro

Non-Gang “Good” Gang “Bad”

Hard to stay in school 28.1 20.8 1.05 48.5 30.8 1.70 Most kids like school 49.4 63.9 1.99% 43.2 46.2 28 Most will graduate

from high school 44.9 75.0 3.98** 30.6 61.5 2.98** A lot of guys in area

want to go to college 47.2 58.3 1.46 37.4 S7.7 1.99**

College is too expensive 76.4 61.3 2.24* 75.7 65.4 1.16 Most guys could get

through college 43.8 54.7 1.46 46.6 50.0 28 *n< .0S

**¥ n< Ol

Table V:2 makes it possible to compare the responses of our “good” boys with those of the non-gang boys, white and black, and of our “bad” boys with those of the gang boys, white and black. Of the blacks, more of our “good” boys see the system of educational opportunities as open than do the non-gang boys in all cases, and the same is true of our “bad” boys in comparison with the gang boys. But among whites, the differences are not so clear. On half the items more of our “good” boys see the opportuni-

ties as Open and on half it is more of the non-gang boys. And there is virtually no consistent difference between the white “bad” boys of our study and the white gang boys of the Short et al study. The blacks in our study are more optimistic than one would normally expect; the “save a Negro” attitude is clearly reflected in the boys’ responses to these items. And the whites are no more nor less optimistic than boys in Chicago. As to the perception of the availability of legitimate occupational opportunities, Table V:3 reveals white “good” boys as more optimistic than white “bad” boys in five of five comparisons, but Negro boys, “good” and “bad,”

66 AN ANOMALOUS SETTING: A LOWER-CLASS SCHOOL

TABLE V-3

Perception of Legitimate Occupational Opportunities of Boys, Aged 12-15, by “Good”-“Bad” Category and by Race Percent of Boys Saying Yes

White White Negro “Good” “Bad” Negro Z “Good” “Bad” Z It is hard to get a good

paying honest job. 49.6 54.9 .80 36.5 53.8 1.50 Most guys will get a

good paying hosest job. 73.5 62.7 1.94 74.0 53.8 1.86 Honest jobs don’t pay

well. 39.3 56.9 2.90* 37.5 34.6 27 You have to have connections to get a good job. 43.1 66.0 3.69* 49.5 44.0 53 It’s hard to make money without doing something

illegal. 24.1 53.1 4.97% 27.1 40.00 1.23 *p< .01 show no consistent differences. In three out of five instances, Negro “good” boys are more optimistic than are white “good” boys about legitimate occupational opportunities; but among “bad” boys, Negroes are more optimistic on four out of five items than are whites. Again, we may have here some

tentative support for the notion that blacks in our study are treated in such a way as to produce more optimism than would be expected. This point becomes even more clear when we compare, as in Table V:4, the blacks in our sample and the gang and non-gang boys of the Short et al study. TABLE V-4

Perception of Legitimate Occupational Opportunities of Boys, by “Good”-“Bad” and Gang—-Non-Gang Categories, and by Race Percent of Boys Saying Yes

Hard to get a good pay-

White White White White Non-Gang “Good” LZ Gang “Bad” Z

ing honest job. 31.6 49.6 2.71** 56.7 54.9 27 Most guys will get a

good paying honest job. 79.7 73.5 1.05 65.6 62.7 42 Honest jobs don’t pay well. 22.8 39.3 2.52* 40.0 56.9 2.28* Have to have connec-

tions to get a good job. 44.3 43.1 AS 56.7 66.0 1.24

Hard to make money without doing something illegal. 13.9 241 1.83 37.8 53.1 2.02*

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 67

Negro Negro Negro

Non-Gang “Good” Z, Gang “Bad” Z Hard to ges a good pay-

ing honest job. 62.9 365 3.48** 77.2 53.8 2.38* Most guys will get a

good paying honest job. 59.6 74.0 1.93 51.9 53.8 18 Honest jobs don’t pay

well. 47.2 37.5 1.20 56.3 34.6 1.96%

Have to have connec-

tions to get a good job. 51.7 49.5 26 53.9 44.0 94

Hard to make money without doing something

illegal. 38.2 27.1 1.52 54.9 40.0 1.40 *p< .05 ** pn < O01

On every item, the black “good” boys in our study perceive legitimate occupational opportunities more favorably than’ do the non-gang boys of the study by Short and associates, and the same is true of the comparison of our “bad” boys and their gang boys. Among whites, the findings are quite different. The non-gang boys respond more favorably to four out of five items than do our “good” boys, and the white gang boys respond more favorably than do our white “bad” boys.

Short, Rivera and Tennyson (1965) argue that boys first appraise the legitimate system, and if they find it impenetrable, they appraise the illegitimate system. Tables V:5 and V:6 present all the items used for measTABLE V:5

Perception of Illegitimate Opportunities of Negro Boys, by “Good”-“Bad” and Gang—Non-Gang Categories Percent of Boys Saying Yes

Negro Negro Negro Negro

Non-Gang “Good” Z Gang “Bad” Z Criminal Learning Structures

There are connections for a guy who wants to

make money illegally. 49.4 54.2 1.37 57.8 64.0 1.56

Learns a lot about crime

from older people. 66.3 67.0 08 75.2 61.5 2.61**

Adults help young guys | make money illegally. 49.4 51.1 20 59.2 46.2 1.23 Visibility of Criminal Careers Some people in this area

make a living illegally. 73.4 61.1 1.50 83.0 65.4 2.26*

Some young guys will make a living illegally

someday. 79.8 54.8 3.21** 83.0 65.4 2.26%

68 AN ANOMALOUS SETTING: A LOWER-CLAssS SCHOOL

Adult Helpfulness

There are adults in this

area who help young

guys get jobs. 93.3 85.4 1.56 82.5 73.1 1.22 Adults in this area do a lot to keep young guys

out of trouble. 91.0 82.3 1.55 67.0 88.5 2.36%

Adult “Clout” ]

Not many really successful people live in

this area. 59.6 53.7 70 63.6 346 2.99**

Adults in this area don’t

have much clout. 42.7 44.4 .20 55.3. 61.5 .63 Elite Criminal Opportunities

Guys making. money illegally answer to big

shots 62.9 64.5 19 62.6 33.3 3.00** Guys have a chance to

make it big in_ the

rackets. 70.8 34.4 4.32** 70.4 52.0 1.99% No racketeers live in

this area. 30.3 60.0 3.54** 54.4 50.0 44

Integration of the Carriers of Criminal and Non-Criminal Values

Some of the most respectable people make

money illegally 19.1 38.9 2.63** 44.2 23.1 2.16* The police get paid off. 37.1 37.1 0 51.5 42.3 93 *p< .0S ED < Ol

uring perceptions of the illegitimate opportunity structure and the proportion of respondents giving positive answers to each item, making it possible to compare the boys in the Chicago study with those in our own. We shall not comment on the subsets of items appearing in Table V:5, nor review in detail the findings contained therein for we are interested only in general patterns insofar as they may confirm our impressions of our lower-class school. We note that fewer of the Negro “bad” boys in our study than of the Negro gang boys from Chicago see the illegitimate opportunity structure as open; on thirteen of fourteen items (p < .01) the differences are in the indicated direction. Negro “good” boys do not, however,

differ from Negro non-gang boys in any consistent manner. It is quite possible that Mr. Wood’s system not only concerns itself particularly with Negro students but especially with those labelled “bad.” The reciprocity

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 69

system which prevails in the school does work, after all, primarily on boys who get into difficulty; to them Mr. Wood’s exchange model is applied and it may be that the system alters the “bad’’ Negro boys’ perception of opportunities. Boys who are “good” stay out of trouble and in their case the system of exchange does not operate.

Again, referring to comparisons among white boys (Table V:6): more TABLE V:6

Perception of Illegitimate Opportunities of White Boys, by ‘“Good’”-“Bad” and Gang—Non-Gang Categories Percent of Boys Saying Yes

White White White White

Non-Gang “Good” Z Gang “Bad” Z Criminal Learning Structures

There are connections for a guy who wants to

make money illegally. 35.4 37.1 26 47.8 54.9 95 Learns a lot about crime from older people. 35.4 50.9 2.37* 52.2 52.9 .O9 Adults help young guys make money illegally. 26.6 31.6 1.50 42.2 40.0 12 Visibility

of Criminal Careers |

Some people in this area

make a living illegally. 60.8 43.6 2.63** 70.0 46.0 3.27**

Some young guys will make a living illegally

someday. 59.5 60.0 07 75.6 60.0 2.24* Adult Helpfulness

There are adults in this

area who help young

guys get jobs. 89.9 86.2 .84 78.9 82.0 52 Adults in this area do a lot to keep young guys

out of trouble. 73.4 80.0 1.23 50.0 78.0 3.92** Adult “Clout”

Not many really successful people live in

this area. 26.6 53.33 4.10** 42.2 54.9 1.70 Adults in this area don’t have much clout. 48.1 46.0 30 48.9 49.0 0 70 AN ANOMALOUS SETTING: A LOWER-CLASS SCHOOL

Elite Criminal | Opportunities

Guys making money il-

legally answer to big

shots. 40.5 57.8 2.65* 45.6 50.0 9

Guys have a_ chance to make it big in the

rackets. 53.2 263 4.37** 62.2 42.0 2.71** No racketeers live in this area. 75.9 67.8 1.35 56.7 70.0 = 1.85 Integration of the Carriers of Criminal and Non-Criminal Values

Some of the most respectable people make

money illegally. 10.1 21.4 2.20% 24.4 340 1.42 The police get paid off. 36.7 26.5 1.72 42.2 33.3 1.23 *p< .05 *ED < 01

of the “bad” boys see illegitimate opportunities as open in four of fourteen items (p < .10). There is no directional trend in the comparison of white “good” boys in our study and white non-gang boys in the Chicago work. Table V:7 presents the comparisons between perceptions of illegitimate opportunity of Negroes and those of whites in our study alone. More of the white “bad” boys tend to see illegitimate opportunities as open than do white “good” boys; they respond to ten of 13 items (there is one tie) in a way consistent with this observation (p < .05). Our Negro “bad” and “good” boys do not differ with any consistency; on the fourteen items, each cateTABLE V:7

Perception of Illegitimate Opportunities of Boys, Aged 12-15, by “Good’-“Bad” Category and by Race Percent of Boys Saying Yes

White White Negro Negro

“Good” “Bad” Z “Good” “Bad” Z Criminal Learning Structures

There are connections for a guy who wants to

make money illegally. 37.1 54.9 2.89** 54.2 64.0 87 Learn a lot about crime

from older people. 50.9 = 52.9 32 67.0 61.5 1.23 Adults help young guys

make money illegally. 31.6 40.0 1.42 51.1 462 1.08

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 71

Visibility

of Criminal Careers Some people in this area

make a living illegally. 43.6 46.0 39 61.1 65.4 39 Some young guys will make a living illegally

someday. 60.0 60.0 00 54.8 65.4 94

Adult Helpfulness

There are adults in this

area who help young

guys get jobs. 86.2 82.0 95 85.4 73.1 1.38

Adults in this area do a

lot to keep young guys |

out of trouble. 80.0 78.0 39 82.3 88.5 .74 Adult “Clout” Not many really success-

ful people live in this

area. 53.3. 54.9 .26 53.7 34.6 1.65 Adults in this area don’t

have much clout. 46.0 49.0 48 44.4 61.5 1.49 Elite Criminal Opportunities Guys making money il-

legally answer to big

shots. 57.8 50.0 1.26 64.5 33.3 2.38* Guys have a chance to make it big in the rack-

ets. 26.3 42.0 2.73** 344 $2.0 1.57 No racketeers live in this area. 67.8 70.0 38 60.0 50.0 .88 Integration of the Carriers of Criminal and Non-Criminal Values

Some of the most respectable people make

money illegally. 21.4 340 2.34* 389 23.1 1.46 The police get paid off. 265 33.3 1.21 37.1 42.3 46

gory replies in a way indicating a greater proportion as perceiving openness seven times. Again, these results may be interpreted in terms of the nature of the school’s efforts on behalf of Negro students.

To recapitulate: we have described the structure and functioning of a school serving lower-class students and argued that the system’s uniqueness

must be taken into account in assessing the data on self-concepts which

72 AN ANOMALOUS SETTING: A LOWER-CLASS SCHOOL

follow. We did find that black students in our study more often tend to see the structure of legitimate opportunities as open to them and the structure of illegitimate opportunities as closed than we might suspect, using Short et al’s study of Chicago adolescents in 1965 as a base line. We believe that the differences are quite likely to be due to the situation in this particular school with its avowed mission to “save a Negro” and its custom of drawing “bad” boys into the legitimate school system by means of its distinctive exchange model.

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 73

CHAPTER VI

FINDINGS: SELF-EVALUATION

We now turn to an examination of our findings and the bearing of them on our hypotheses, beginning with the evidence concerning the quality of self concepts.

We expected that those of our subjects whom we called “bad” (those whom we considered as high delinquency risks), would evidence quantitative-

ly poorer self-concepts than would those referred to as “good”: that is, that the former would evaluate themselves as less good than the latter. This was premised in part on locating the “bad” boys at a point (or a region) on a scale of commitment to a deviant role somewhere between “good” boys and

boys who are heavily committed to a delinquent role. Our hypothesis, it should be noted, actually calls for the comparison between only two points on our scale of commitment to a deviant role—an early point and a middle point. Only for this comparison have we adequate data. On the assumption

that older boys who are regarded by their teachers as high delinquency risks are further along the continuum of commitment to a delinquent career than are younger boys, we make the comparison between a middle and a later point. However, we must give warning again that, while we make the comparison, the inferences we draw therefrom remain highly tentative.

74 FINDINGS: SELF EVALUATION

The theoretical rationale supporting our predictions emphasizes the active nature of the process of developing identities. To restate our premises: persons seek to create stable identities; they prefer to think positively of themselves; and the process of stabilizing an identity involves confirming re-

sponses from others with whom one interacts. Good boys are presumably faced with favorable evaluation responses from others, boys in the process of becoming deviant with mixed evaluational responses, and thoroughly committed bad boys with responses consistently premised on their identification as delinquent. It follows that the self-concepts of our ‘‘bad” boys—boys we presume to be in the process of sifting and sorting reactions to themselves as they try to develop reasonably stable identities—should be poorer than the self-concepts of either “good” boys or more completely committed delinquents.

The “I Am” Responses Pertinent to the present hypothesis are the differences between the self-

concepts of “good” and “bad” boys on four dimensions of the self— Evaluation, Activity, Potency and Interpersonal Quality—which we extracted by factor analyses of the boys’ responses to the semantic differential, using the “I Am” tag. Expressing the diferences in self-concept first as means and then as rank orders, we compare white boys with Negro boys, aged 12-15,

and then white middle-class boys with white lower-class boys in the same age range.! Then we examine the data most directly appropriate to our hypothesis—the comparison of “good” and “bad” boys within class (lower class only) and racial categories. Again, we make incidental use of data on boys aged 16 and over.

Table VI: 1 presents the means, differences between means, and t-tests of the significance of the difference between means of the quality of selfconcepts of white and Negro boys, all lower-class aged from 12 to 15. TABLE VI:1

Quality of Self-Concept on Four Dimensions of Self, of Lower-Class Boys, Aged 12-15, by Race Means and Standard Deviations of Scale Scores

White Negro

Dimension of Self: (N=313) (N=85) Difference and t-tests*

Evaluation xX 18.89 16.60 2.29 SD 5.05 6.36 t= 2.92, p < .Ol Activity X 15.51 14.14 1.37 SD 6.13 6.31 t= 1.83, p < .10 Potency XSD12.57 11.17 1.40 4.67 4.71 t= 2.43, p < .02 Interpersonal xX 24.46 21.93 2.53 Quality SD 7.08 7.13 t= 2.90, p < .0l * Two-tailed tests. 1 As the result of the restrictions imposed from without on our sampling processes,

this was the only class comparison that we could make.

DEVIANCE, SELVES AND OTHERS 75

Lower scores indicate more positive (more favorable) responses to self. Hence it is clear that the Negro boys have more positive images of themselves on all four dimensions of self. The difference in each of the four comparisons is in this direction; and in three of the four instances—Activity is the exception—the differences reach statistically significant levels.

The only class comparison permitted by our data is among white boys (Table VI:2). A statistically significant difference by class appears on the dimension, Interpersonal Quality, the lower-class boys responding more positively to themselves. There are no differences between the classes on the three remaining dimensions. TABLE VI:2

Quality of Self-Concept on Four Dimensions of Self, of White Boys, Aged 12-15, by Class Means and Standard Deviations of Scale Scores

Lower-Class Middle-Class Difference and

Dimension of Self: (N=313) (N=49) t-test

EvaluationSD xX 5.05 18.894.56 18.00t=89ns.

Activity xSD 15.51 6.1315.53 4.44 —.02 t = ns. Potency xSD 12.57 4.6712.51 2.96 t.06 = ns.

Interpersonal xX 24.46 26.75 —2.29

Quality SD 7.08 6.19 t = 2.36, p < .02

We now turn to the basic data testing our expectation that “good” and “bad” boys will differ in the quality of their responses to themselves (Table

VI:3). Note that all the boys represented in this table are aged 12-15 and TABLE VI:3

Quality of Self-Concept on Four Dimensions of Self of Lower-Class Boys, Aged 12-15, by “Good’-“Bad” Category and by Race

White Negro

Means and Standard Deviations of Scale Scores

“Good “Bad” Difference “Good” “Bad” Difference (N=223) (N=90) and t-test* (N=56) (N=29) and t-test Dimension of Self:

Evaluation X 19.01 1868 .39 15.77 17.86 —2.10

SD 5.71 5.54 5.98 n6.83 p