Social Strain Theory: A Sociological Analysis

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Social structure theories are theories that discuss the criminal behavior of people in their society. According to Schmalleger (2012) the formal and informal economic and also social arrangement are the root cause of crime and deviance in their society. As producer of crime behavior, social structure theories illustrate the negative aspect such as disorganization within the family, poverty, and the disadvantage due to lack of success in the educational process. There are negative influences of social environment such as poverty, lack of education, broken families, and disorganized neighborhood. According to Schmalleger (2012) “sociological analysis has implicated the social system as the potential element for kids dropping out of school …show more content…

Robert K. Melton in (1938) offered the delinquency as a form of adaptive problem solving behavior. It commits to the response of problem by involving the frustrating and undesirable social environments and also developed a concept called “anomie” which is a French word that means “normlessness” (.p.158). Merton did preserve a genuine goal such as wealth, status, and personal happiness that are generally seen as a desire to everyone, but they commonly accepted to see the goals as education, hard work, and financial savings that are not equally …show more content…

Sellin (1938) stated that the root cause of crime could be discovered in different values for what is acceptable or proper behavior. According to Sellin, conduct norms provide the valuative basis for human behavior that acquired early in life through childhood socialization. Also, clash of the norm between variously socialized group that resulted to crime. There are two types of cultural conflict theory which are: primary conflict and secondary conflict. In primary conflict the clashes occurs when the fundamental clash of culture evolves, while the secondary conflict is when the small culture within the primary one that is being clash finds a fault in the lower-class norm that will result to

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