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- Discovering disorder: young people and delinquency
Discovering disorder: young people and delinquency

This free course, Discovering disorder: young people and delinquency, 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 approach looks at why some individuals and some behaviours, but not others, are defined as disorderly.
Course learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
o:
- compare and contrast two different approaches to studying juvenile delinquency
- understand psychological approaches to studying juvenile delinquency such as Eysenck’s personality theory and the Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development behaviour which focus on explaining why some individuals commit crimes yet others do not
- understand sociological approaches to studying juvenile delinquency, such as those by Howard Becker, Stanley Cohen, and Stuart Hall and his colleagues, which focus on explaining why some individuals and some behaviours are labelled as deviant while others are not.
First Published: 11/12/2014
Updated: 14/11/2018
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Course content
- Introduction
- Learning outcomes
- 1 Discovering disorder: young people and delinquency
- 2 Studying the causes of juvenile delinquency
- 3 Studying the control of disorder
- 4 Similarities and differences between the approaches
- 5 Conclusion
- Glossary
- References
- Acknowledgements
- This site has Copy Reuse Tracking enabled - see our FAQs for more information.
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8 hours study
Level 1: Introductory
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