William McCord

Family Relationships and Sexual Deviance in Lower-Class Adolescents

we do not have as yet an adequate scientific basis for stating the exact relationships involved&dquo;.(’) > Studies of the sources of sexual deviation have, in general, followed one of two approaches. The first, most popular type of analysis has secured self-reports from individuals and attempted to correlate variations in sexual behaviour with certain past or contemporaneous experiences. The immensely popular and significant Kinsey Report illustrates this kind of tactic. From it and others like it, we have learned of the relation between sexual behaviour and such broad social phenomena as class position, social mobility, and religious faith. Such studies have largely failed, however, to produce information concerned with the possible impact of early social relationships upon sexuality. Despite methodological safeguards, these studies have consistently suffered from two defects: first, since research information has been gathered, typically through self-reports, one cannot discount the presence of conscious or unconscious biases as contaminating factors; second, information on early socialization has always been analysed retrospectively-thus making it impossible to separate true from false recollections of the past.

Two Approaches to the Cure of Delinquents

William McCord is a Woodrow Wilson fellow and a teaching fellow at Harvard University. Formerly a teacher and counselor at San Quentin Prison, he is now completing his studies in social science. Joan McCord is a teacher in Concord, Massachusetts. With her husband, she served as co-director of childrens camps in California and is continuing her work in child psychology at Harvard. This article assesses the effects of two training schools on the personalities, values, and leadership patterns of seventy delinquents.-EDITOR.