Introduction

This course will introduce two approaches to understanding juvenile delinquency. The psychological approach focuses on examining what makes some individuals, but not others, behave badly. The sociological approaches looks at why some individuals and some behaviours, but not others, are defined as disorderly. Much of this course is based on the chapter ‘Discovering disorder: young people and delinquency’ by Catriona Havard and John Clarke (2014).

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course DD102 Introducing the social sciences .