The positivist school introduced the problem of causality into criminological thinking. Examining the potential causes of crime has been tackled from a range of differing perspectives, including:
The project of seeking the ‘scientific facts’ that can explain criminality has been – and continues to be – a dominant strand within academic criminology.
Positivism does not concern itself with the abstract and unprovable, but rather with the tangible and quantifiable. Through the acquisition of ‘objective knowledge’ it is assumed that most social problems can be better understood and treated. The key characteristic of the positive school is its emphasis on applying the methods of the natural sciences to the study of human behaviour. Within criminology, positivist approaches have focused on searching for the causes of criminal behaviour and have assumed that behaviour is predictable and determined.
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