Social Constructionist Theory Of Crime

Research in regards to the effects of crime news on it’s consumers has been of great interest to sociologist and criminologist since the nineteenth century (Lotz, 1991), and has develop under the perspective of *social constructionism*. The theory was originally composed by sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman in the mid 1960’s, in an attempt to explain how individuals form perceptions of reality from socially created entities, and socialization (1966). They preposed that society became “subjectively” (Segre, 2016) meaningful in two stages of socialization, primary and secondary. The former occurs during childhood with close family and peers while the later occurred when entering the objective world. ::The proposed processes of “subjective”
Before Berger and Luckman various criminological theories were applied by criminologist researchers with conflicting ideologies concerning crime news and its effect. Since the adoption of the social constructionist model several major categories of the theory have been developed to organize both current and past research as well as the potential effects of crime news since American industrialization. These category consist of three major theoretical models, the *hypodermic needle *, * limited effects* and *minimal effects* models. They consist of immediate effects on perceptions in the *hypodermic needle *model, partial perceptual effects in the* limited effects* model and overall minuscule effects under the *minimal effects* model. As media has become far more widely available and evolved into the mass consumership of today, social constructionism continues to be used to better research crime and media and it’s
Though the presumed effects the prevalence of crime news had were purely theoretical, and what Wilcox lacked in methodology he supplemented with extensive sampling and large quantifications of qualitative data, including multiple social variables. He was able to gather data from dozens of publications across the United States, including French and German news outlets that were popular regionally at the time (Ibid.). That stated, the original work of Wilcox, his predessor Caldwell of the early twentieth-century researchers had little or no criminological focus on crime or victimization. Similarly, the research was limited due to technological restraints that prevented researchers from conducting long-term longitudinal studies, and data analysis that was calculated by hand, and subject to errors. Later studies refined newspaper content analysis began employing more complex methodology, and though they predominately consisted of small sample sizes and regional publications (Caldwell, 1932; Davis, 1952), until technological improvements supported complex modeling and allowed greater access to newspaper archives. Even though the data collected during the era were substantial and statistically significant (Caldwell, 1932; Wilcox, 1900) the actual hypothesis and measures were tautological in their subjective