Date of Award:

5-1967

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department:

Psychology

Department name when degree awarded

Educational Psychology

Committee Chair(s)

David R. Stone

Committee

David R. Stone

Committee

Frances Halstrom

Committee

John C. Carlisle

Committee

Homer Johnson

Committee

Kaye Owen

Abstract

The author serves as Director of Education of the Utah State Industrial School, a school charged with the responsibility for the custody and treatment of delinquents committed to its care from the juvenile courts of the state. For many years he has been concerned about the personality structure of the children committed to the care of the Industrial School. He became particularly interested in the possibility that there is a definable relationship between types of delinquent acts and personality-motivation profiles. Further motivation was given to this interest when he received an answer to some correspondence from a colleague of Dr. Raymond Cattell, Dr. George R. Pierson, who has been doing extensive research with delinquent youth. Dr. Pierson stated in a letter to the author:

As you indicate, many have proposed the existence of delinquent types and indeed we seem able to see them quite clearly clinically. It remains for someone to demonstrate their existence quantitatively. To do so would be to take a tremendous step forward in our understanding of delinquency. I maintain that really adequate treatment can not take place until these types are clearly delineated. We need only an analogy from medicine to remind us of the serious consequences of misdiagnosis (Pierson, August 18, 1966).

The need for a study of this type appears to be based on the principle that in order to rehabilitate the delinquent child, we need to understand him much better than we do at the present time.

The author proposed to conduct a research study in the area of typology as related to delinquency. It was hoped that this research would yield evidence supporting the hypothesis that types may be described.

It is to be observed that delinquent children are socially and to a degree, emotionally maladjusted. This social and emotional maladjustment includes:

I. Children who are extremely disruptive, destructive, hostile, impulsive and delinquent.

II. Children who are immature, overfearful, withdrawn, uncommunicative, apathetic, and readily thrown off balance.

III. Children of good intelligence but with severe learning disabilities resulting in poor academic achievement. One rarely finds such a child who does not also manifest a more general pattern of emotional disorders.

IV. Children with severe psychic disorders as diagnosed by clinicians.

The adherents of the psychiatric approach to delinquency have typically regarded antisocial behavior as a result of emotional disturbance in an individual. All deviant behavior is seen as a make-up of something in the individual which may be labeled variously as personal disorganization, intrapsychic conflict, or "maladjusted personality," and this psychological "sickness" interferes with the normal development of conformity (Aichhorn, 1935; Fenichel, 1945; Karpman, 1935; Redland and Wineman, 1951, 1952; Zilborg, 1943).

There is an extensive overlapping and interchanging of symptoms among these children. However, it was noted from a review of the literature and from a study of a fairly large sample at the Utah State Industrial School (here-in-after referred to as SIS) that there are several reasonably well differentiated fundamental patterns of behavior displayed by maladjusted children.

The subjects for this study are all adjudged delinquents committed to the care and custody of the Superintendent of the Utah State Industrial School.

Viewed symptomatically, all delinquent behavior, regardless of the specific form it may take, has the common denominator of maladaptation of the individual to the demands of a social code. From the viewpoint of the investigator of behavior and its motivations, juvenile delinquency is merely a form of maladjustment to the complex standards of adult social life, which is expressed in acts that happen to have been prohibited by law under threat of punishment. From a clinical point of view, other forms of maladjustment might be more serious than those types of behavior which the law prohibits.

Delinquency should be seen from the point of view of the integration of the total personality. There are four levels wherein personality may be studied: (1) The socio-cultural level where conflict is shown by delinquency, crime, or other forms of maladjustment of the individual to the taboos, demands, conventions, and laws of society; (2) The somatic level where disharmony is indicated by disproportions between the structure of two or more segments of the physique and by ill health; (3) The intellectual level where discord may be revealed by contrasts between capacities of abstract intelligence, or by excessive variability in types of intellectual capacity; (4) The emotional-temperamental level where disharmony is shown by mental conflict and by the tensions between repressed and forgotten emotional experiences and more recent experiences or those between divergent instinctual energy propulsions typically reflected in the phenomenon of ambivalence (Shaw, 1942; Lombroso, 1911; Fink, 1938; Gluech, 1918; Karpman, 1935; Alexander, 1940; Friedlander, 1947).

Nowadays, "human personality" is broadly conceived as the dynamic organization of the cognitive, affective, conative, physiological, and morphological aspects of the individual. Under this definition the study of the personality concerns the structure of the body and the functions of its organs, as well as the manner of . . . thinking, feeling, and willing. An adequate study of personality requires an integrated attack upon all these aspects of the individual. (Sheldon, 1940, pp. 2-3)

It should be added that an adequate investigation of personality comparison requires the use of standardized tools which have built into them the qualifications to measure the soma and psyche within a person as well as the interplay between the person and the environment. Such tools are found in the tests developed by the Institute for Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT) which are used in this study, namely the High School Personality Questionnaire (HSPQ), and the Motivational Analysis Test (MAT) (IPAT, 1966).

It is common to compress all delinquents into one category, a procedure that is being increasingly seen as a vast oversimplification of the problem. Mental health-oriented workers in the area left the impression that delinquents as a group had problems amenable only to therapeutic intervention while sociologists took an equally narrow view, maintaining that community planning and intervention were the answer (Alexander, 1940). There have been typologies of delinquency offered in addition to that of individual and sociologic delinquency, but by and large, all of these have grown out of the wisdom and experience of long-time experts in the field and rest on experiential rather than empirical data.

One exception is the work of Hewitt and Jenkins (1946) who using statistical methods, delineated three juvenile antisocial behaviorial syndromes which to some degree approximate the individual sociologic dichotomy mentioned above. These authors also investigated background factors found to relate to these syndromes, assumed the relationship to be a casual one, and on the basis of differences in etiology arrived at quite different treatment recommendations for the three types of delinquents. Their work has considerable relevance to the problem of conformity in juvenile delinquency and provides the theoretical framework within which the present study was conceived.

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