BOOK REVIEWS
| Date | 01 March 1955 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1955.tb01637.x |
| Published date | 01 March 1955 |
BOOK
REVIEWS
Deprived Children
Towards an Understanding
of
Juvenile Delinquency
By
HILDA
LEWIS
(Oxford University Press).
1954.
Pp. xvii
+
163. 9s.
6d.
By
BERNARD
LANDER
(Columbia University Press, Oxford University Press).
1954.
Pp. xv
+
143. 24s.
THE
use of statistical method, as distinct
from counting,
has
been slow to find its
way into the armoury
of
the administrator.
While he has always been ready to provide
data upon which decisions must be based,
and often presents it with great clarity
and force, the information at his disposal
is usually limited, and too often is relevant,
but not quite conclusively
so,
to the
decision to be made. There are
no
doubt
a
wide range of administrative matters
in which statistical refinements are not
worth the effort, or the use of numerical
methods
is
not possible. Nevertheless
there remain fields where statistics can
give real aid.
One
of
these fields is undoubtedly
that of the administrator who is responsible
for a rehabilitative service. He sees his
clients
or
patients coming in, he has to
decide what provision is to be made to
meet their differing needs and how that
provision can best be operated. He wants
therefore to know into what categories he
can divide his clientele in a way relevant
to the practicable treatments available,
and how successful he is being in doing
this. Thus he must know both about
causation and about its relation to the
success of the treatment given.
Dr. Lewis has provided some very
useful information of this kind in relation
to provision for deprived children. She
has studied the careers of
500
Kcnt
children admitted to the Mersham Recep-
rion Centre between October,
1947,
and
July,
1950
;
their background, their
personalities, and, in the case of
240
of
them, their subsequent histories. Their
backgrounds form a picture familiar to
the social worker
:
overcrowding, large
families, broken homes. Of the
363
families,
30
per cent. were fatherless and
17
per cent. motherless, and some
40
per cent. of the cases in which relations
between parents could be judged showed
104
serious family dissensions. There were
66
problem families.
The difficulty of classifying personality
is met by using categories derived by
Hewitt and Jenkins at Michigan Child
Guidance Clinic by the use of multiple
correlation analysis. They were only
able to
fit
40
per cent.
of
their cases into
these categories without overlapping, and
it
is not surprising that Dr. Lewis also
has some difficulty in using the method,
but one has sympathy with her attempt
to do
so.
Nevertheless, it does not scem
to improve upon an empirical approach,
and the interesting conclusions are that
119
children seemed normal in behaviour,
and
115
only slightly abnormal, rather
than that they belonged to thc schema
adopted. What is even more interesting
is the bearing
of
this study upon rhe
Bowlby thesis of the relation between
separation of mother and child in early
childhood and the
“
affectionless
”
type
of child. The findings of this study
indicate no clear connection between
separation from the mother in early child-
hood and any particular variety of dis-
turbed behaviour. Furthermore, of
19
“
affectionless
”
children, tcn had never
been separated from their mothers for
more than a few weeks, and four more
only temporarily. The figures are small,
but then
so
are the figures in much of the
evidence Bowlby cites as supporting his
thesis.
Another very interesting finding is that
“
the proportion
of
children undisturbed
in behaviour is considerably higher in
the
‘
problem families
’
than in the general
run of children admitted to the centre,”
which suggests that we are perhaps
too
prone to remove children from problem
families because we do not happen to
like the
way
hey live. On the other
hand, Dr.
Lewis
does not explain how
exactly she defines this class of family
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