Agnew's Social Control Theory

The social control theory has been significantly important to predict delinquency in individuals especially on adolescents. It has become a dominant theory compare to any other theories relating to delinquency. Base on the social control theory, there exists four social bonds that prevents a juvenile from committing delinquency. The four social bonds are attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. It was previously stated that Hirschi’s social control theory is able to explain 25% to 50% of the variance in delinquency. However, Professor Robert Agnew did not agree with social control theory being superior to other theories in the field of delinquency. In fact, he believed that it had a small impact in predicting delinquency among juveniles.
According to the theory, an individual is prone to breaking the law when there is a breakdown with their social bonds. Those social bonds consist of attachments to other individuals, commitment to following the rules, involvement in society, and belief. When one of these four social bonds is broken, the person is most likely to engage in a criminal activity. In his longitudinal test, Agnew is trying to testify that the social control theory has a small percentage in predicting delinquency among juveniles. He based the experiment of Paternoster’s study. Paternoster’s study consisted of 300 freshmen students at a University. There were some problems with the experiment because Paternoster did not take into consideration that the parental attachment becomes weak once the child leaves to college. The data of Agnew’s study consisted of surveys given to 2,213 10th graders in public schools. The study was directed by the Institute of Social Research, University of Michigan. According to the researcher, they concluded that this experiment was “essentially unbiased representation.” They study lasted for two years. The first data collection was in 1966 and the second data collection was in 1968 when the respondents were at the end of 11th grade. 1,886 (85.5%) adolescent boys from the Time 1 data collection were surveyed again in 1968. They study employed 8 measures which to gather data from the correspondents. The eight measures consisted of parental attachment, grades, belief, dating index, school attachment, involvement, commitment, and peer-attachment. The two most significant variable control variables was grades and belief. The delinquency was measured on two self-report scales, “Total Delinquency” and “Seriousness of Delinquency.” Then each category ranged in the scale of 1-5 from “1” never committed no act to “5” which meant that the respondent committed five or more acts. The result of the study was