Context:
The aim of this project is to investigate into how differences in attitudes and
Characteristics within male and female leads to females committing less crime. These characteristics may arise from biological differences. It is believed that women are innately different from men, with a natural desire to be caring and nurturing, characteristics which involves having values that do not support crime. On the other hand men are known to possess more dominant and aggressive characteristics. Many sociologists argue that these aggressive characteristics are brought about through the way in which male and female are socialised.
According to one approach, girls are socialised differently to boys. The values that girls are brought up to hold are those that simply do not lead to crime. Talcott Parsons (1937) argues for instance, that most child rearing is carried out by mothers and therefore girls have a clear role model to follow that emphasises care and support. Traditionally, females followed their mothers as role models and their main priority in life was to be a housewife too. Often this meant that many females, being stuck at home, were lacking opportunity to commit crime. This is because they are more likely to be subjected to close supervision, have less opportunity for acting on their own initiative, unsupervised and so forth. Hence they generally have less opportunity for committing ‘white collar’ crimes such as fraud, embezzlement, etc.
I am interested however, to find out whether females being socialised in a different way and lacking opportunity are the key factors in explaining low rates of female crime. I believe that the particular theory on lack of opportunities is limited to women that are married and have responsibilities. It fails to recognise that young females in their teens are not necessarily restricted to opportunities especially in the 21st century.
It can also be criticised that those women who follow the traditional role of being housewives often face the dual burden. Working class, single mothers may revert to criminal acts such as shoplifting in order to put food on the table.
Nevertheless, although shoplifting is a criminal act, it can be taken into consideration the situation and circumstance and that it was not the females intention to cause any harm, which would relate back to my hypothesis of women having different attitudes towards committing crime.
In contrary attitudes of males towards committing crime can be seen differently. For example the sociologist Messerschmidt (1993) argues that there exists a ‘normative masculinity’ in society that is highly valued by most men. Normative masculinity refers to the socially approved idea of what a ‘real male’ is. He suggests that masculinity is not something natural but rather a state that males only achieve as an accomplishment’, which involves being constantly worked at. Construction of masculinity however takes place in different contexts. For example businessmen express their power over women through their control in the workplace. Similarly men who are less powerful in the workplace express their power at home through exerting violence at home. Consequently it can be seen that, it is achieving masculinity that leads some men to commit crime, in particular crime is committed by those less powerful in an attempt to be successful at masculinity.
The desire of young males to gain the status of being ‘masculine’ exists within education. In Paul Willis’s study of the ‘Lads’ he discovered that many of the working class boys rejected school values and education because they knew they were destined for factory jobs and were happy with this. As a result they reverted to delinquent and often criminal behaviour in order to gain some kind of status. This study may be a prime example of the kind of ‘laid back’ attitudes young males had towards achieving, which as a result made them prone to committing more crime, as a way of perhaps getting by in life. Nonetheless it can be criticised that Paul Willis’s study merely focuses on working class males. Many male criminals may be of middle class background, especially within ‘white collar’ crimes.
METHODOLOGY
There are numerous sociological methods that can be used for my study, all of which have advantages and disadvantages attached. My initial choice of method was to use questionnaires, open ended questionnaires to be precise. Open ended questionnaires have the advantage of letting respondents express their views in depth without having to feel restricted to a particular choice of an answer. Nevertheless I came to realise that a great fraction of the questionnaire would consist of open ended questions and this will put people off as it involves a fair amount of writing. This might lead to the problem of having low response rates which in turn would affect the reliability of my results. After weighing out the advantages and disadvantages of using questionnaires I came to a conclusion that I will carry out interviews. Having done a pilot study by talking to a group of my friends I came to realise that this would be the best method to go by. My research is based on people’s attitudes towards committing crime and the best way to get an understanding of people’s attitude is to ask people without limiting the responses to fixed choices allowing the issue to be explored in greater depth.
I carried out the pilot study with a group interview where the atmosphere remained very informal as I raised questions relating to my research. The group consisted of both males and females who expressed their views and attitudes on the questions being raised. After carrying out the pilot study I found that the more informal the method was, the more detailed the answers were. The method of an unstructured interview was one that I was going to use as it was the method that enabled me to get perspective on people’s views. However one thing I decided to change after carrying out the pilot study was to make the interviews one to one. This is because I realised how many of the responses that people gave may have been influenced by views of other respondents that were present, which will effect the validity and reliability of my results, which would affect the overall usefulness of the research.
The interview will be held in my sixth form centre where my sample will consist of 10 males and 10 females all aged between sixteen and eighteen year. I will randomly select these people and therefore the type of sampling being used is known as random sampling. The sixth form I attend is very multicultural so I will try to keep a look out for any particular patterns there may be, for example a particular view may be common within certain ethnicity.
When carrying out the interviews I will ensure that I do not use any leading questions or influence the participant’s replies in any way.
I have considered the possibility that some questions may involve the respondents having to look back in the past (e.g. childhood and how they were brought up) which may cause some of the responses to be unreliable as it depends on the respondents memory. Nevertheless it is unlikely that the respondents will lie or make up any answers because I will not be a stranger to them.
I have decided to carry out the interviews during my free periods, with people that are free at the same time, which makes my sample random.
Before carrying out the interview I prepared a set of questions that I will ask all participants, among the set of questions were a few closed questions I was going to use. The reason for using closed questions was that it will give me a chance to ask questions that are based on set scenarios and to see which of the multiple choice answers they would choose.
