Jackson Toby

The Differential Impact of Family Disorganization

M ANY studies purport to show that the incidence of broken homes is greater among families of delinquents than among families generally.1 If delinquency is more likely to occur in a disorganized family than in a normal one, the family situation may somehow create the delinquency. But how? Perhaps a disorganized family tends to produce children with sick personalities, and sick personalities have unusual difficulty conforming to social rules.2 On some such assumptions consensus appeared possible on the causal connection between family disorganization and delinquency. Then Shaw and McKay suggested, after a comparison of the incidence of broken homes among Chicago schoolboys and male juvenile de-

Universalistic and Particularistic Factors in Role Assignment

Sociological theory . . . is for us that aspect of the theory of social systems which is concerned with the phenomena of the institutionalization of patterns of value-orientation in the social system, with the conditions of that institutionalization, and of changes in the patterns, with conditions of conformity with and deviance from a set of such patterns and with motivational processes in so far as they are involved in all of these. . ..39