Transcript

Professor John Muncie

Over the years of this study the most important individual factors that seem to emerge were low intelligence, personality and impulsiveness. The strongest family factors were criminal and antisocial parents, poor parental supervision and disruptive families. Whereas the most notable environmental factors were association with like-minded friends and peers, living in areas of high deprivation and high-delinquency-rate schools. Now on this basis the Cambridge Study then contended that these chronic offenders could be identified with reasonable accuracy at the age of ten. The importance of this research is that it has been replicated not just in the UK but across many USA cities and also in Scandinavia and Australia. So the argument is that what the risk factor paradigm actually represents is something of a global knowledge. Now it’s interesting to see how this has filtered through into precise policy terms where the strongest influence has been a focus on individual and family factors rather than the environmental ones.