Question

How do social structural arrangements affect social processes that, in turn, account for variations in rates of deviant behaviors?

Answer 1

Akers’s social learning theory has explained a considerable amount of the variation in criminal and deviant behavior at the individual level, and Akers (1998) recently extended it to posit an explanation for the variation in crime at the macrolevel. Akers’s social structure and social learning (SSSL) theory hypothesizes that there are social structural factors that have an indirect effect on individuals’ behavior. The indirect effect hypothesis is guided by the assumption that the effect of these social structural factors is operating through the social learning variables (i.e., differential association, definitions, differential reinforcement, and imitation) that have a direct effect on individuals’ decisions to engage in crime or deviance.

Individuals’ decisions to engage in crime/deviance are thus a function of the environment wherein the learning takes place and the individuals’ exposure to deviant peers and attitudes, possession of definitions favorable to the commission of criminal or deviant acts, and interactions with deviant models. Stated in terms of a causal process, if the social learning variables mediate social structural effects on crime as hypothesized, then (a) the social structural variables should exhibit direct effects on the social learning variables; (b) the social structural variables should exert direct effects on the dependent variable; and (c) once the social learning variables are included in the model, these variables should demonstrate strong independent effects on the dependent variable, and the social structural variables should no longer exhibit direct effects on the dependent variable, or at least their direct effects should be substantially reduced.