A2 Psychology at Spalding Grammar School

Two year-old James Bulger was abducted from a shopping centre in Bootle in 1993. His mutilated body was found on a railway track two days later. The killers were two ten year-old boys: Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. Both boys game from poor and broken homes in Merseyside. Thompson was the fifth of seven children, the father having deserted them five years before and the mother turning to drink and leaving the children unsupervised. Venables' parents were separated but his mother suffered from depression and he was diagnosed as hyperactive and attention-seeking. Both boys truanted from school regularly and were exposed to 18-Certificate horror videos. The case caused a sensation at the time and still arouses strong passions. Venables and Thompson were released in 2001, their identities and location a secret to protect them from reprisals. Some people argue that the support and education offered to them in detention in fact improved their life chances, compared to what would otherwise have happened to them. But can upbringing explain this sort of crime? Click the picture to watch Polly Toynbee's report on Venables & Thompson (you will need RealPlayer).

Your first Independent Study is on Upbringing and is divided into three areas:

• Learning from others
• Disrupted families
• Poverty & disadvantaged neighbourhoods

To help you complete the work, view this PowerPoint slideshow. It will not be enough by itself, however: you'll also need to read through the page linked to each of the bullet points.

1. The main problem with research into the effects of upbringing is that it's very difficult to be sure what factors are really at work. For example, you might look at single parent families, but the problem is that these families are very often poor as well, so is it the family structure or poverty that's at work? Because of this, research into upbringing can have low validity (if the researcher's focusing on the wrong thing) and it's often reductionist (because you focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else).
2. Since upbringing happens over a long period of time, there are two ways of studying it. Longitudinal studies follow a cohort of children as they develop over the years (eg Farrington's study of East End boys and the PADS study). Snapshot studies look at individuals at one moment in time then generalise the conclusions to older or younger children (eg Bandura's study on aggressive role models or Bowlby's study of juvenile thieves).
3. A lot of this research can be very determinist if it suggests that people from a certain sort of background have no choice about turning to crime. In fact, in the real world most people grow up to be law-abiding and this includes most people from poor, single-parent families. There seems to be an element of choice or free will at work. Put it another way, these explanations are very situational but people's dispositions play a part in whether they turn to crime or not. A final way of looking at this is that these explanations look entirely at the importance of nurture, but some people might be criminals by nature.
4. This sort of research is very useful for governments and social services agencies. Governments are in a good position to tackle poverty and educational failure and their laws and policies affect family break-up (eg the 1969 Divorce Reform Act or Gordon Brown's introduction of Working Families Tax Credit). Social workers use this research to identify "at risk" families who might benefit from their help while judges might take this research into account when sentencing someone with a particular sort of upbringing.