1.a.

How can an upbringing in a disrupted family explain

criminal
behaviour?
Farringtons longitudinal research suggests that criminality is connected to
our upbringing. Those with the most disrupted upbringing are likely to be
the most criminal. By disrupted upbringing, Farrington refers to events, or
characteristics in peoples family lives that lead to a lack of stability and
predictability. Certain disruptive events or characteristics appear to
correlate with likely criminality. For example, across the time frame of
Farringtons research, from 8 years of age to 48 only 7% of his 411 young
males, presented as career criminals. This 7% were unable to lead a life
away from criminality. If we correlate these recidivist criminal family
background factors, we find evidence of disruption in their lives. They
were more likely to have family members in jail and were more likely to
have experienced poor parenting. These factors cause disruption because
poor parents are likely to struggle to set boundaries and rules to stick to
and criminal families are likely to experience financial difficulties and
changes to their lives which are outside of their control.
Farrington also correlates poor academic attainment as a factor in young
peoples criminality. This could again be explained by and therefore
connected to living a disrupted family life. Those who come from a family
whereby they may be expected to work instead of going to school, such as
those with one parent, parents in prison, or families in poverty are likely to
be in those who struggle in their school work. They will not have the
stability and security at home to support their work at school. Thus, again
there is some evidence with Farringtons longitudinal research that a
disrupted family life may in the end lead to a criminal life because the
boys who come from families in poverty and fail to gain qualifications to
escape that poverty are the boys more likely to commit crime.

1.b. Evaluate the use of longitudinal research when

considering upbringing as an explanation of crime.
Longitudinal research is that which takes place over an extended period of
time. This method of research has been used by psychologists, such as
Farrington and Wikstrom, looking to explore the connections between
upbringing and criminality for a number of reasons.
The first, and most important of these, is that longitudinal research affords
the researcher the chance to see how upbringing factors identified in
childhood impact on how we then behave in adulthood. This is because
longitudinal research allows us to revisit people and see how their lives
developed, rather than snapshot studies which would just allow us to see
which people behaving at a set point. Farrington uses this technique to
see when young people start and stop being criminals; he uses this

information to then correlate criminality over a long period of time to

specific upbringing factors such as parental criminality. Thus, by
undertaking longitudinal research he is able to see which upbringing
factors in early childhood emerge as the most important long term
indicators of serious criminality and failed lives.
Equally, longitudinal research is useful to help us explain the impact of
upbringing because it allows peoples lives to play out and develop
without the direct manipulation and intervention of the researcher. If we
compared it to other methods such as observation or field experiments,
Longitunidal research where the researcher drops in and out of peoples
lives for small periods of time is far less intrusive and has far less impact
on a persons behaviour. This is because we are not manipulating aspects
of peoples lives; we are simply recoding what has happened since we last
saw the participants. This makes the research more ethical too. For
example the PADS could not manipulate and control for poor parental
behaviour and a lack of supervision over childrens whereabouts and
moral development. This would be seen as having a deliberately
damaging impact on a subjects life and thus, causing harm to a
participant. Longitudinal research simply allows us to watch and observe
over time from a removed position.
Finally, the benefit of longitudinal research is that it begins to allow us to
answer questions about disposition verses situation as an explanation of
offending behaviour. As we can track people across time, we can see if
they remain criminals all of their lives, which would suggest a dispositional
explanation is more valid or do they drift out of crime, suggesting a more
situational or transient explanation may have greater validity. In
Farringtons study we have a situational explanation, suggested by the fact that
93% of Farringtons sample committed crime of some kind, but only 7% remained
chronic offenders. This suggests that crime is both likely to affect all of us and is not
really dispositional as we are very able to stop. We are only able to see these trends
and correlate them to upbringing factors because of the longitudinal nature of the
research.
However, there are a number of flaws to longitudinal research that need
to be understood in the context of upbringing being a satisfactory
explanation for crime. Firstly, subject attrition is an issue that will be
difficult to overcome over a long period of time and will have an impact on
any conclusions we can make about upbringing being related to crime. It
is likely that we will lose participants over time and it is likely that the
populations we lose and keep will have specific characteristics that may
skew the data and our conclusions. For example in Farringtons study by
the age of 48 we are only left with 93% of the original 411 males. It is
likely that those dead or not participating by this stage are those who
came from the most disadvantaged and the poorest backgrounds as there

are correlations between socio-economic status and early mortality. They

are also the most likely groups to be involved in serious crime and drug
use. In other words the most valid population of a study on upbringing and
criminality are the most likely to be no longer part of the study data, thus
affecting the validity of the data Farrington uses.
In conclusion, Longitudinal research is likely to be the best method in this
context. If we are to see the impact of long term issues such as upbringing
on a persons criminality, then we most likely need to follow their lives in
the long term as well.