SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY: ITS MANIFESTATION

TO JUVENILE DELINQUENCY

A Term Paper

Presented to

Mr. Silver S. Lising R.Crim

Wesleyan University Philippines – Cusman Campus

In Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Criminology 2

Crim 2 – Theories of Crime Causation

Presented by

COMPRADO, CHAN VERLY S.

DE LEON, GODJETH A.

VIVAR, HAETTENSCHWEILER T.

BSCrim 2-1

December 2020
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ABSTRACT

Social learning theory offers a valuable basis for examining violence and training

and learning of anti-social or criminal activity of juvenile offenders. This study explores

the philosophy of social learning and the quality of parent-child relationships from a

behavioral research viewpoint and offers a basis for a holistic approach to behavioral

therapy for juvenile offenders and their parents. The goal of this study was to include a

social framework to explore how violence and neglect, irregular or erratic parental

patterns, family dynamics and coercive discipline measures can be combined to forecast

juvenile delinquency. The aim of this study is to explore the main environmental

determinants that influence the quality of parent-child relationships and related anti-social

behaviour in children and the appropriate, yet implicit, behavioral values that function at

home. Conclusions are reached that learning and reinforcement history have a greater

impact on the quality of parent-child relationships than family structure, and provide a

theoretical rationale for analyzing and developing effective interventions for a problem of

social importance. Recommendations are raised which suggest that typical or mainstream

juvenile detention programs compete with the acquisition of new functional skills, and

provide an environment for learned dysfunctional habits that are then reinforced and

maintained in treatment programs that continue to model or promote criminal behavior.

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TABLE OF CONTENT

Title Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

Abstract. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

Table of Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1-3

Main Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4-8

Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9-10

Recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11-12

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

List of Appendices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
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INTRODUCTION

For many young people today, traditional patterns guiding the relationships and

transitions between family, school and work are being challenged. Social relations that

ensure a smooth process of socialization are collapsing; lifestyle trajectories are

becoming more varied and less predictable. The restructuring of the labour market, the

extension of the maturity gap (the period of dependence of young adults on the family)

and, arguably, the more limited opportunities to become an independent adult are all

changes influencing relationships with family and friends, educational opportunities and

choices, labour market participation, leisure activities and lifestyles. It is not only

developed countries that are facing this situation; in developing countries as well there

are new pressures on young people undergoing the transition from childhood to

independence. Rapid population growth, the unavailability of housing and support

services, poverty, unemployment and underemployment among youth, the decline in the

authority of local communities, overcrowding in poor urban areas, the disintegration of

the family, and ineffective educational systems are some of the pressures young people

must deal with (World Youth Report, 2003)

Youth nowadays, regardless of gender, social origin or country of residence, are

subject to individual risks but are also being presented with new individual opportunities

—some beneficial and some potentially harmful. Quite often, advantage is

being taken of illegal opportunities as young people commit various offences, become

addicted to drugs, and use violence against their peers.

The problem of juvenile delinquency is becoming more complicated and universal,

and crime prevention programs are either unequipped to deal with the present realities or
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do not exist. Many developing countries have done little or nothing to deal with these

problems, and international programs are obviously insufficient. Developed countries are

engaged in activities aimed at juvenile crime prevention, but the overall effect of these

programs is rather weak because the mechanisms in place are often inadequate to address

the existing situation.

Moreover, at this case, social learning theory is increasingly cited as an essential

component of sustainable natural resource management and the promotion of desirable

behavioral change. (Muro & Jeffrey 2008). This theory is based on the idea that we learn

from our interactions with others in a social context. Separately, by observing the

behaviors of others, people develop similar behaviors. After observing the behavior of

others, people assimilate and imitate that behavior, especially if their observational

experiences are positive ones or include rewards related to the observed behavior.

According to Bandura, imitation involves the actual reproduction of observed motor

activities. (Bandura 1977).

Social Leaning Theory has become perhaps the most influential theory of learning

and development. It is rooted in many of the basic concepts of traditional learning theory.

This theory has often been called a bridge between behaviorist learning theories and

cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation.

(Muro & Jeffrey 2008). However, on this regards, Bandura believes that direct

reinforcement could not account for all types of learning. For that reason, in his theory he

added a social element, arguing that people can learn new information and behaviors by

watching other people.

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This paper predicts that all of these factors including non-intact family structure

(contextual variable), will have significant additive effects in the development of poor or

weak parent-child relationships, and may affect the likelihood of antisocial or criminal

behavior in young adults.

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MAIN BODY

Research studies focusing on the causes of juvenile delinquency have proposed that

the structure of the family and the quality of parent-child relationships have important

implications for the development of antisocial behavior in children, and may affect adult

criminal behavior across the life course (Ganem & Agnew, 2007). These studies have

primarily examined the major environmental predictors of juvenile crime: family, school,

and peer variables, from the perspective of social control theory or social learning theory

(Giordano et al., 2002). The core principle of social learning theory is that parents and

other influential people in the community act as important examples and play a crucial

role in teaching antisocial or criminal behavior to adolescents. This study explores the

philosophy of social learning as a psychological framework for understanding the impact

that violence and associated interactions have on the quality of parent-child relationships

from a behavioral research viewpoint.

Researchers working on the roots of youth delinquency concluded that any attempt to

investigate the connection between parenthood and criminality should concentrate on the

quality of parent-child relationships rather than on the mere involvement or absence of

parents. This is particularly valuable in predicting the causes of juvenile delinquency,

notably in intact families that have a delinquent child and in whom children have been

exploited or ignored as part of their early history. Research on abused and neglected

children has consistently commented that a disproportionate number of delinquent youth,

particularly those charged with violent offences, were severely abused in childhood and

throughout adolescence (Lewis, Mallouh, Webb, 1997).

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Albert Bandura expands this perspective in a social context and believes that people

learn behavior through observing others’ behaviors. Consequently, many modes of

behavior are learned by observation of other behavior models; and in this way the

individual has the knowledge of the ways of displaying subsequent behaviors and thus

this codified knowledge directs individual in his/her subsequent behaviors (Bandura,

1977). People’s environment or surroundings cause them to behave in certain ways with

their power to reinforce or discriminate, and thus environment, individual, and behavior

are interrelated (Ormrod, 1999: p. 2).

Social learning theories are based on the assumption that behavior is learned through

some certain processes as observation, imitation and behavior modeling (Ormrod, 1999:

1). Within this context, they stress that primary groups and intimate/admiring people are

the key factors which compromise the individual’s major source of reinforcements (Vito

et al., 2007: p. 177). In this way social learning theories highlight both the individual and

the social sources of behavior. So, the studies in the field of criminal behavior are more

likely to analyze the environment where the crime is learned and criminal behavior than

the criminals.

Moreover, Authors of recent family studies on the impact of family relationships on

juvenile delinquency have proposed that different parenting practices have important

implications for the quality of parent-child relationships, with the majority of work

indicating that family systemic factors most strongly associated with juvenile

delinquency are those which include weak bonds or attachment impairments between

parents and children (Agnew, 2005; Farrington, 2002), often exacerbated through poor or

erratic parenting practices, and involve parents who employ harsh or coercive methods of
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discipline. As such, these children are not likely to perceive parents or caregivers as being

a source of safety, and instead typically show an increase in aggressive and hyperactive

behaviors, which Schofield & Beek, (2005) suggest disrupt healthy or secure attachment

with their parents. This is of particular importance in families who have a delinquent

youth or parent who has engaged in crime, and in which children have been abused or

neglected as part of their early experiences. Research investigating the impact of violence

and neglect on the child's perceived consistency of parent-child relationships and the

mutual effects of coercive parental approaches and irregular or unpredictable parenting

behaviors has related these inter-family factors to emotional and behavioral problems in

these children and has established a multidimensional causal framework for perceived

qual. Not surprisingly, researchers investigating treatment interventions in regard to

abuse and attachment related disorders, find that such children present as a diagnostic

challenge (O’Connor & Zeanah, 2003), and are likely to "view" a parent as a source of

terror and someone who must be controlled through manipulation and intimidation

(Hughes, 2004). Descriptions of these children suggest they lack impulse control, a

conscience and adequate moral development, and often present as superficially engaging

or connected to others, emotionally aloof, and likely to engage in criminal or deviant

activity (Dyer, 2004; O’Connor & Zeanah, 2003). Researchers investigating the affects of

abuse and the reciprocal relation between violence or abusive disciplinary methods and

inconsistent parenting practices on problem behavior report similar findings. They

indicate that such children, often having experienced neglect associated with nonintact

family structure, are typically more likely than non-victims to become offenders

(Brezina, 1998; Thornberry et al., 2001; Widom & Maxfield, 2001), to be arrested at
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earlier ages (Widom & Maxfield, 2001), to have higher levels of trauma symptomatology

(Lehmann, 1997; Rossman et al., 1997), and report poor or weak parent child

relationships (Ganem & Agnew, 2007).

Social learning theory (Bandura and Walters, 1963; Bandura, 1973, 1977; Conger,

1976, 1980; Akers, Krohn, Lanza-Kaduce, & Radosevich, 1979; Akers, 1985; Krohn,

Massey, Skinner, 1987) has been used to explain conforming, appropriate behaviors as

well as problem behaviors among adolescents literally from its inception in the 1960s.

This theory posits that patterns of behavior are learned through interaction with various

reinforcing or socializing agents, and through these interactions, rewarded behaviors

(direct contact) are adopted, reinforced behaviors (modeling or indirect contact) are

maintained and punished behaviors are extinguished. Social learning theory, then, “favors

a conception of interaction based on triadic reciprocality, and suggests that behavior,

cognitive and other personal factors, and environmental influences all operate as

interlocking determinants that affect each other bidirectionally” (Bandura, 2004, pg. 27;

Bandura, 1977a, 1982b). This view of human behavior is particularly important in

families in which children have been abused and neglected, since the social learning

process links the development of criminal behavior from involvement with others (family

contextual factors and other interfamilial processes), and the mediating influence of

rewards, reinforcements and punishments (Iwata & Worsdell, 2005). As such, Akers’

version of social learning theory is important to this paper and establishes the theoretical

link between the paper's hypotheses and the operant functional relations associated with

the family and later behavior.

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Social learning theory is one of the theories that are referred to explain criminal

behavior, whose origins rooted in Gabriel Tarde’s theory of imitation. This theory implies

that individuals learn certain behavioral patterns by imitating the others’ behaviors.

Furthermore, Akers agrees with this logic and agues that learning also takes place

through observation or modeling, also referred to as imitation. In the case of imitation or

modeling, the basic functional relation includes the following: when an agent, whether

socializing or reinforcing, observes the activities and messages of others or from the

media, and adopts or learns new behavior, the process is called ‘‘imitation.’’ Although

there is still debate on the exact definition of imitation (Byrne and Whiten 1988;

Tomasello 1990), most researchers agree that imitation is similar or analogous to

modeling but distinctly different from copying and mimicking. Research in animal

learning suggest that mimicking is merely involved in recording and reproducing

observed actions, while imitation or modeling needs some sort of abstraction and

understanding of observations (Arbib 2000; Breazeal and Scassellati 2000).

Since children and youth learn and assimilate knowledge through interaction with

their parents and others, the authors agree with this distinction and consider conception

and abstraction as an important component of observational learning and as an effective

means for transferring knowledge into behavior from parent to child via the

discriminative stimuli and differential reinforcement link in this study.

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CONCLUSIONS

This paper builds on a variety of academic bodies and the leading crime theory to

conclude that the effect of violence and neglect on family relationships has major

consequences for the quality of parent-child relationships, because the lower quality of

parent-child relationships could render the greater the risk of juvenile delinquency. One

of the overarching results most directly linked to youth delinquency is that the direct and

indirect encounters with others have emerged as dominant in the management and control

of the individuals behavior. While early experiences associated with abuse and neglect do

not cause pathology in a linear way (Stroufe, Carson, Levy, & Egeland, 1999), the

resulting negative effects are subject to the same lawful inevitabilities as other behavior,

and behavior problems or aggressive acts must be evaluated and treated within the

context of the reciprocal parent-child interaction that takes place within a family.

Hence, in the social learning system, patterns of behavior can be acquired through

direct experience or by observing the behavior of others. The more primary form of

learning, rooted in direct experience, is largely governed by the rewarding and punishing

consequences that follow any given action. People are repeatedly confronted with

situations with which they must deal in one way or another. Thus, it is commonly

believed that responses are automatically and unconsciously strengthened by their

immediate consequences. Simple performances can altered to some degree though

reinforcement without awareness of the relationship between one’s actions and their

outcomes.

Social learning theory assumes that modeling influences produce learning principally

through their informative functions and that observes acquire mainly symbolic
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representations of modeled activities rather than specific stimulus response (Bandura,

1971). A person cannot learn much by observation if he does not attend to, or recognize,

the essential features of the model’s behavior.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

While much continues to be learned, the study indicates that the major obstacle in the

care of young offenders, especially for those who have been victimized or ignored as part

of their early experience, is the inability of policy makers to identify and acknowledge

significant connections in interlocking behavioral contingencies that form and sustain

violence and resulting anti-social behavior. At this case, it represents a major

shortcoming in politically mandated policies that govern young criminal offenders, and

suggest the need to reconsider current prevention and inhibition practices and policy

approaches related to youth at risk for, and exposed to, abuse and violence in the family.

While most physically abused children do not become violent delinquents (Lewis,

Mallouh, Webb, 1997), adjusting or modifying the source of violence, especially among

households with a delinquent or a parent involved in crime, starts by promoting public

visibility and enhancing detention and appraisal techniques among targeted families.

Because individual discrepancies in children are determined by prior learning, addressing

vulnerable communities to include evidence-based solutions, considering economic and

legislative limitations, is crucial and requires municipal mental health providers and other

core programs to interface with public health, foster care and the juvenile justice system.

However the key to progress starts by urging decision makers to reject existing

juvenile custody programs and follow a modern, evidence informed paradigm that

acknowledges the role of family contextual and structural influences as part of the

challenge. This new approach is based on the assumption that a child’s behavior

problems are considered to occur within the context of a reciprocal parent-child

interaction that takes place within a larger family and community system. (For a
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discussion and overview of the behavioral approach to treatment applied to abused

children placed in foster and adoptive families see Prather, 2007.)

This call for a new evidence-driven philosophy that transcends legislative restrictions

is not based on denying the causal sequences between learning and criminal conduct, but

on recognizing that “research has shown that the most effective way to reduce problem

behavior is to strengthen desirable behavior through positive reinforcement rather than

trying to weaken undesirable behavior using aversive or negative (punishment)

processes” (Bijou, 1988). Front-end initiatives such as the Compulsory Pre-Kindergarten,

whose aim is to guarantee that all children are mentally, spiritually, physically and

socially ready to start school, are a big step in the right direction and will have lifelong

implications for children, not least by demonstrating and teaching safe conduct

incompatible with violence.

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REFERENCES

Akers, R.L. (1994). Criminological theories: Introduction and evaluation. Los Angeles:

Roxbury Publishing Co.

Alfaro, J. D. (1978). Report on the Relationship between Child Abuse and Neglect and

Later Socially Deviant Behavior. Albany, NY: New York State Assembly.

Alfaro, J. D. (1981). Report on the relationship between child abuse and neglect and later

socially deviant behavior. In R. J. Hunner and Y. E. Walker (Eds.), Exploring the

Relationship between Child Abuse and Delinquency, Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osman.

Bandura, A., & Walters R. H. (1963). “Social Learning and Personality" Development.

New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston.

Haapasalo J. (2001). How do young offenders describe their parents? Legal and

Criminological Psychology, 6, 103–120

Patterson, G. R., & Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (1984). The correlation of family

management practices and delinquency. Child Development, 55, 1299-1307.

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York: Macmillan.

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LIST OF APPENDICES

Name: Comprado, Chan Verly S.

Age: 20
Birthdate: December 18, 1999
School: Wesleyan University-Philippines
Name of Parents: Charito Comprado
Virgilio Comprado
Motto in Life: “Your liberty will not be freely given to you. You must be bold to liberate
yourself.”

Name: De Leon, Godjeth A.

Age: 20
Birthdate: June 04, 2000
School: Wesleyan University-Philippines
Name of Parents: May A. De Leon
Gaudencio O. De Leon
Motto in Life: “Life isn’t finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself”

Name: Vivar, Haettenschweiler T.

Age: 20
Birthdate: March 2, 2000
School: Wesleyan University-Philippines
Name of Parents: Gilber J. Vivar
Esperclever T. Vivar
Motto in life: “No matter how slow you go, as long you do not stop”.(Confucius)