Critique of Risk Factor Research
Two UK academics, Stephen Case and Kevin Haines, among others, criticized risk factor research in their academic papers and a comprehensive polemic text, Understanding Youth Offending: Risk Factor Research, Policy and Practice.
The robustness and validity of much risk factor research is criticized for:
- Reductionism - e.g. over-simplfying complex experiences and circumstances by converting them to simple quantities, relying on a psychosocial focus whilst neglecting potential socio-structural and political influences;
- Determinism - e.g. characterising young people as passive victims of risk experiences with no ability to construct, negotiate or resist risk;
- Imputation - e.g. assuming that risk factors and definitions of offending are homogenous across countries and cultures, assuming that statistical correlations between risk factors and offending actually represent causal relationships, assuming that risk factors apply to individuals on the basis of aggregated data.
Read more about this topic: Juvenile Delinquency
Famous quotes containing the words critique of, critique, risk, factor and/or research:
“Wagner’s art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self- critique of German nature that it is possible to conceive.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Wagner’s art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self- critique of German nature that it is possible to conceive.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“You factor in racism as a reality and you keep moving.”
—Jewell Jackson McCabe (b. 1945)
“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?””
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)