Showing papers by "Travis Hirschi published in 1985"

Age and Crime, Logic and Scholarship: Comment on Greenberg

Abstract: When we first read David F. Greenberg's attack on our article "Age and the Explanation of Crime," we were more than a little puzzled. Why were we confronted with a blunderbuss critique of our research that does not even attempt to advance a positive thesis? Why are we challenged by an elementary description of the advantages of longitudinal designs, especially one that fails even to mention the sh6rtcomings of these designs? Why are we said to be wrong on the basis of data that fail to meet even minimum scientific standards? Why are contrived and partially analyzed cohort data damaging to our position? Most troubling of all, why is our scholarly integrity challenged with repeated allusions to our alleged failure to report facts we were aware of but that are contrary to our thesis? We did, it is true, seriously question Greenberg's explanation of the age-crime relation, but he himself grants that we did so out of logical necessity. If what we said was true, what Greenberg said could not be true. We did not question his competence or scholarship. We merely questioned his theory, a theory not original to him and one that had already received a good deal of well-earned criticism from many quarters over a period of about 15 years. There must be something more behind Greenberg's attack. We think the answer lies in the challenge that our invariance thesis presents to the Marxist principle of historical specificity and in the general abhorrence Greenberg has for our positivism. In his text Crime and Capitalism, Greenberg notes that Marxist criminologists believe that findings are only valid within the context of given social arrangements and that they therefore "do not seek laws of crime that remain invariant across epochs, independent of the mode of production" (1981, p. 18). Positivism, on the other hand, is said to be logically defective and politically dangerous. Our proposition could not be in greater contradiction to Greenberg's fundamental assumptions. Therefore, he apparently feels

All Wise After the Fact Learning Theory, Again: Reply to Baldwin

Abstract: . 1981b. Beyond Sociobiology. New York: Elsevier. Burgess, R. L., and R. L. Akers. 1966. "A Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory of Criminal Behavior." Social Problems 14:128-47. Ellis, M. J. 1973. Why People Play. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Farley, F. H., and S. V. Farley. 1972. "Stimulus-seeking Motivation and Delinquent Behavior among Institutionalized Delinquent Girls." Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 39:140-47. Giordano, P. C., and S. A. Cernkovich. 1979. "On Complicating the Relationship between Liberation and Delinquency." Social Problems 26:467-81. Kish, G. B. 1966. "Studies of Sensory Reinforcement." Pp. 109-59 in Operant Behavior: Areas of Research and Application, edited by W. K. Honig. New York: Appleton. Zuckerman, M. 1974. "The Sensation Seeking Motive." Pp. 79-148 in Progress in Experimental Personality Research, vol. 7. Edited by B. A. Maher. New York: Academic Press.