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¶ … Saints
The Roughnecks and the Saints: A Research Overview
The essential problem that the researcher set out to address in this article was the perception of and reaction to delinquency amongst teenagers in a specific town. more specifically, the researcher ended up identifying a difference in the way teenage boys of different socioeconomic backgrounds were viewed by teachers, the police, and other community members in light of their delinquency, though it is not clear that the research understood this to be the central problem when the research was initiated. As currently published, however, it is clear that the central identified problem is the lack of consistency with which rules and laws are applied, a lack of coherence in the perception of these boys based solely on their behavior, and a lack of equal treatment based on these self-reinforcing perceptions.
Research Questions
Again, it is not clear that the author/researcher had clear or specific research questions in mind when the research was begun, and there is certainly no hypothesis stated that might help determine what these initial research...
The general research questions that appear to have guided this research include, what types of behaviors that can be lassified as "delinquent" to these boys engage in? What is the degree or frequency of these delinquent behaviors? How are these behaviors viewed by the boys' teachers, police, and other community members? What effects do the delinquent behaviors and the community's reactions to these delinquent behaviors have on the individuals involved?
Variables
Because there was not a specific hypothesis given at the beginning of the research article, and due to a lack of concrete and explicitly defined research questions, the identification of variables in this study must likewise be made by the reader through inference and observation. Socioeconomic status appeared to be a primary independent variable, as did the actual delinquent behaviors that the boys were involved in and the frequency of these acts. Dependent variables examined were the reactions of various community members to the delinquency these boys engaged in and the effects of these reactions on the boys themselves. Essentially, the research…
Saints and Roughnecks was the title given to Chambliss' 1973 study in which he found that class and not crime often determines a person's reputation in the society and his fate with the police. The author, William Chambliss' selected two different groups of teenagers for his study, one coming from affluent part of the metropolitan area and are labeled Saints for the study, while the other group came from lower-income
Saints and the Roughnecks - William J. Chambliss In his seminal essay "The Saints and the Roughnecks," William J. Chambliss studied how a community's differential perceptions led to preferential treatment of a group of juvenile delinquents from upper-middle class families over another gang of delinquents from lower-class families. The main determinant for a community's reaction to a juvenile's deviant behavior was socioeconomic class. Since this essay's publication in 1973, the idea that
Saints and the Roughnecks by William Chambliss is a masterpiece study in Seattle suburb in the 1970s and it demonstrates the significance of connecting the macro and micro factors together. (Conformity, deviance and Crime) The Saints and the Roughnecks were two clusters of boys from the same Hanibal High School, who got involved in the same kinds of abnormal behaviors but were branded differently by the public. (Violence; Disease
In his concluding questions, Chambliss notes these reactions, questioning how the meanings that were assigned to both groups by the townspeople, school officials, and police affected their futures. For this reason, Symbolic Interaction theory can be applied to the case of the Saints and the Roughnecks. In assigning values to both groups, members outside of these groups most likely impacted the groups' futures, according to Chambliss. The decisions of the
When speaking of visibility and demeanor, he refers to the fact that the Saints had access to vehicles to take them out of the eyes of their regular neighborhood, where as the boys did not have this privilege and therefore had to commit their delinquent acts directly under the eyes of the community. When discussing bias, he refers to the class structure and how the elite tend to view
Reflection: Saints and RoughnecksIn his essay �The Saints and the Roughnecks� William Chambliss examines a curious phenomenon in high school: while delinquent behavior was common among boys of various social classes at Hannibal High School, only the negative behaviors of the lower-class, less academically inclined boys was viewed as delinquent. The clean-cut, high-achieving so-called Saints often cut class early, hung out at pool halls, and, objectively speaking, engaged in more