9 The Study of Deviance

PROBLEMS AND SYMPATHIES

THE most persistent difficulty in the scientific study of deviant behavior is a lack of solid data, a paucity of facts and information on which to base our theories. I think it a truism to say that a theory that is not closely tied to a wealth of facts about the subject it proposes to explain is not likely to be very useful. Yet an inspection of the scientific literature on deviant behavior will show that it assays a very high proportion of theory to fact. A critic of studies of juvenile delinquency recently pointed out that the best available source of facts on boys' gangs is still Frederick Thrasher's The Gang, first published in 1927.'1

This is not to say that there are no studies of deviant behavior. There are, but they are, on the whole and with a few outstanding exceptions, inadequate for the job of theorizing we have to do, inadequate in two ways. First, there simply are not enough studies that provide us with facts about the lives of deviants as they live them. Although there are a great many studies of juvenile delinquency, they are more likely to be based on court records than on direct observation. Many studies correlate the incidence of delinquency with such factors as kind of neighborhood, kind of family life, or kind of personality. Very few tell us in detail what a juvenile delinquent does in his daily round of activity and what he thinks about himself, society, and his activities. When we theorize about juvenile delinquency, we are therefore in the position of having to infer the way of life of the delinquent boy from fragmentary studies and journalistic accounts 2 instead of being able to base our theories on adequate knowledge of the phenomenon we are trying to explain. It is as though we tried, as anthropologists once had to do, to construct a description of the initiation rites of some remote African tribe from the scattered and incomplete accounts of a few missionaries. (We have less reason than the anthropologists had for relying on fragmentary amateur descriptions. Their subjects of study were thousands of miles away, in inaccessible jungles; ours are closer to home.)

Studies of deviant behavior are inadequate for theorizing in a second and simpler sense. There are not enough of them. Many kinds of deviance have never been scientifically described, or the studies are so few in number as to be a bare beginning. For instance, how many sociological descriptions are there of the way of life of homosexuals of various kinds? I know of only a few,3 and these simply make clear that there is a vast variety of cultures and social types to be described. To take an even more extreme case, an area of deviance of utmost importance for sociological theorists has hardly been studied at all. This is the area of professional misconduct. It is well known, for instance, that the ethics committees of legal and medical professional associations have plenty of business to occupy them. Yet, for all the wealth of sociological descriptions of professional behavior and culture, we have few if any studies of unethical behavior by professionals.

What are the consequences of this insufficiency of data for the study of deviance? One consequence, as I have indicated, is the construction of faulty or inadequate theories. Just as we need precise anatomical descriptions of animals before we can begin to theorize about and experiment with their physiological and biochemical functioning, just so we need precise and detailed descriptions of social anatomy before we know just what phenomena are present to be theorized about. To recur to the example of homosexuality, our theories are likely to be quite inadequate if we believe that all homosexuals are more or less confirmed members of homosexual subcultures. A recent study reveals an important group of participants in homosexual relations who are not in the least confirmed homosexuals. Reiss has shown that many juvenile delinquents "hustle queers" as a relatively safe way of picking up money. They do not regard themselves as homosexuals and when they reach an age to participate in more aggressive and profitable kinds of delinquency they drop the practice.4 How many other varieties of homosexual behavior await discovery and description? And what effect would their discovery and description have on our theories?

We do not, then, have enough studies of deviant behavior. We do not have studies of enough kinds of deviant behavior. Above all, we do not have enough studies in which the person doing the research has achieved close contact with those he studies, so that he can become aware of the complex and manifold character of the deviant activity.

Some of the reasons for this deficiency are technical. It is not easy to study deviants. Because they are regarded as outsiders by the rest of the society and because they themselves tend to regard the rest of the society as outsiders, the student who would discover the facts about deviance has a substantial barrier to climb before he will be allowed to see the things he needs to see. Since deviant activity is activity that is likely to be punished if it comes to light, it tends to be kept hidden and not exhibited or bragged about to outsiders. The student of deviance must convince those he studies that he will not be dangerous to them, that they will not suffer for what they reveal to him. The researcher, therefore, must participate intensively and continuously with the deviants he wants to study so that they will get to know him well enough to be able to make some assessment of whether his activities will adversely affect theirs.

Those who commit deviant acts protect themselves in various ways from prying outsiders. Deviance within organized conventional institutions is often protected by a kind of cover-up. Thus, members of the professions do not ordinarily speak about cases of unethical practice in public. Professional associations handle such matters privately, punishing culprits in their own way without publicity. Thus, doctors addicted to narcotics are punished relatively lightly when they come to the attention of law enforcement authorities.5 A doctor found stealing from hospital narcotics supplies is, ordinarily, simply asked to leave the hospital; he is not turned over to the police. To do research in industrial, educational, and other kinds of large organizations ordinarily requires getting the permission of the people who run those organizations. If the managers of the organization are allowed to, they will limit the area of inquiry in such a way as to hide the deviance they want hidden. Melville Dalton, in describing his own approach to the study of industry, says:

In no case did I make a formal approach to the top management of any of the firms to get approval or support for the research. Several times I have seen other researchers do this and have watched higher managers set the scene and limit the inquiry to specific areas—outside management proper—as though the problem existed in a vacuum. The findings in some cases were then regarded as "controlled experiments," which in final form made impressive reading. But the smiles and delighted manipulation of researchers by guarded personnel, the assessments made of researchers and their findings, and the frequently trivial areas to which altered and fearful officers guided the inquiry—all raised questions about who controlled the experiments.6

Members of deviant groups which do not have the covert support of organized professions or establishments use other methods of hiding what they are doing from outside view. Since the activities of homosexuals, drug addicts, and criminals take place without benefit of institutionally locked doors or guarded gates, they must devise other means to keep them hidden. Typically, they take great pains to conduct their activities in secret, and such public activities as they engage in take place in relatively controlled areas. For example, there may be a tavern that is a hangout for thieves. While many of the thieves of the city will thus be available in one place to a researcher who wants to study them, they may "dummy up" when he enters the tavern, refusing to have anything to do with him or feigning ignorance of the things he is interested in.

These kinds of secrecy create two research problems. On the one hand, one has the problem of finding the people he is interested in. How does one find a physician who is a drug addict? How does one locate homosexuals of various kinds? If I wanted to study the splitting of fees between surgeons and general medical practitioners, how would I go about finding and getting access to the people who participate in such arrangements? Once found, one has the problem of convincing them that they can safely discuss the problem of their deviance with you.

Other problems present themselves to the student of deviance. If he is to get an accurate and complete account of what deviants do, what their patterns of association are, and so on, he must spend at least some time observing them in their natural habitat as they go about their ordinary activities. But this means that the student must, for the time being, keep what are for him unusual hours and penetrate what are for him unknown and possibly dangerous areas of the society. He may find himself staying up nights and sleeping days, because that is what the people he studies do, and this may be difficult because of his commitments to family and work. Furthermore, the process of gaining the confidence of those one studies may be very time consuming so that months may have to be spent in relatively fruitless attempts to gain access. This means that the research takes longer than comparable kinds of research in respectable institutions.

These are technical problems and ways can be found to deal with them. It is more difficult to deal with the moral problems involved in studying deviance.

This is part of the general problem of what viewpoint one ought to take toward his subject of study, of how one shall evaluate things conventionally regarded as evil, of where one's sympathies lie. These problems arise, of course, in studying any social phenomenon. They may be aggravated when we study deviance because the practices and people we study are conventionally condemned:I

In describing social organization and social process—in particular, in describing the organizations and processes involved in deviance—what viewpoint shall we take? Since there are generally several categories of participants in any social organization or process, we must choose between taking the viewpoint of one or another of these groups or the viewpoint of an outside observer. Herbert Blumer has argued that people act by making interpretations of the situation they find themselves in and then adjusting their behavior in such a way as to deal with the situation. Therefore, he continues, we must take the viewpoint of the person or group (the "acting unit") whose behavior we are interested in, and:

. . . catch the process of interpretation through which they construct their actions. . . . To catch the process, the student must take the role of the acting unit whose behavior he is studying. Since the interpretation is being made by the acting unit in terms of objects designated and appraised, meanings acquired, and decisions made, the process has to be seen from the standpoint of the acting unit. . . . To try to catch the interpretive process by remaining aloof as a so-called "objective" observer and refusing to take the role of the acting unit is to risk the worst kind of subjectivism—the objective observer is likely to fill in the process of interpretation with his own surmises in place of catching the process as it occurs in the experience of the acting unit which uses it.8

If we study the processes involved in deviance, then, we must take the viewpoint of at least one of the groups involved, either of those who are treated as deviant or of those who label others as deviant.

It is, of course, possible to see the situation from both sides. But it cannot be done simultaneously. That is, we cannot construct a description of a situation or process that in some way fuses the perceptions and interpretations made by both parties involved in a process of deviance. We cannot describe a "higher reality" that makes sense of both sets of views. We can describe the perspectives of one group and see how they mesh or fail to mesh with the perspectives of the other group: the perspectives of rule-breakers as they meet and conflict with the perspectives of those who enforce the rules, and vice versa. But we cannot understand the situation or process without giving full weight to the differences between the perspectives of the two groups involved.

It is in the nature of the phenomenon of deviance that it will be difficult for anyone to study both sides of the process and accurately capture the perspectives of both classes of participants, rule-breakers and rule enforcers. Not that it is impossible, but practical considerations of gaining access to situations and the confidence of the people involved in any reasonable length of time mean that one will probably study the situation from one side or the other. Whichever class of participants we choose to study and whose viewpoint we therefore choose to take, we will probably be accused of "bias." It will be said that we are not doing justice to the viewpoint of the opposing group. In presenting the rationalizations and justifications a group offers for doing things as it does, we will seem to be accepting its rationalizations and justifications and accusing the other parties to the transaction in the words of their opponents. If we study drug addicts, they will surely tell us and we will be bound to report that they believe the outsiders who judge them are wrong and inspired by low motives. If we point to those aspects of the addict's experiences which seem to him to confirm his beliefs, we will seem to be making an apology for the addict. On the other hand, if we view the phenomenon of addiction from the point of view of enforcement officials, they will tell us and we will be bound to report that they believe addicts are criminal types, have disturbed personalities, have no morals, and cannot be trusted. We will be able to point to those aspects of the enforcer's experiences which justify that view. In so doing, we will seem to be agreeing with his view. In either case, we shall be accused of presenting a one-sided and distorted view.

But this is not really the case. What we are presenting is not a distorted view of "reality," but the reality which engages the people we have studied, the reality they create by their interpretation of their experience and in terms of which they act. If we fail to present this reality, we will not have achieved full sociological understanding of the phenomenon we seek to explain.

Whose viewpoint shall we present? There are two considerations here, one strategic and the other temperamental or moral. The strategic consideration is that the viewpoint of conventional society toward deviance is usually well known. Therefore, we ought to study the views of those who participate in deviant activities, because in this way we will fill out the most obscure part of the picture. This, however, is too simple an answer. I suspect that, in fact, we know little enough about the viewpoints of either of the parties involved in phenomena of deviance. While it is true that we do not know much about how deviants themselves view their situations, it is also true that we are not fully aware of, because we have not studied sufficiently, other viewpoints involved. We do not know what all the interests of rule enforcers are. Nor do we know to what extent ordinary members of conventional society actually share, to some degree, the perspectives of deviant groups. David Matza has recently suggested that the characteristic forms of youthful deviance—delinquency, radical politics, and Bohemianism—are in fact subterranean extentions of perspectives held in less extreme form by conventional members of society. Thus, delinquency is a stripped-down version of teen-age culture; radical politics is an extreme version of the vague liberalism contained in the American penchant for "doing good"; and Bohemianism may simply be an extreme version of frivolous college fraternity life, on the one hand, and of the serious intellectual theme in college life on the other.9 Strategic considerations, then, provide no answer to which viewpoint we should describe.

But neither do temperamental and moral considerations give us an answer. We can, however, be aware of some of the dangers involved. The main danger lies in the fact that deviance has strong connections with feelings of youthful rebelliousness. It is not a matter people take lightly. They feel either that deviance is quite wrong and must be done away with or, on the contrary, that it is a thing to be encouraged—an important corrective to the conformity produced by modem society. The characters in the sociological drama of deviance, even more than characters in other sociological processes, seem to be either heroes or villains. We expose the depravity of deviants or we expose the depravity of those who enforce rules on them.

Both these positions must be guarded against. It is very like the situation with obscene words. Some people think they ought never to be used. Other people like to write them on sidewalks. In either case, the words are viewed as something special, with mana of a special kind. But surely it is better to view them simply as words, words that shock some people and delight others. So it is with deviant behavior. We ought not to view it as something special, as depraved or in some magical way better than other kinds of behavior. We ought to see it simply as a kind of behavior some disapprove of and others value, studying the processes by which either or both perspectives are built up and maintained. Perhaps the best surety against either extreme is close contact with the people we study.

1. David J. Bordua, "Delinquent Subcultures: Sociological Interpretations of Gang Delinquency," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 338 (November, 1961), 119-136.

2. Two well-known and influential recent books on juvenile delinquency are based on such fragmentary data. See Albert K. Cohen, Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1955); and Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd E. Ohlin, Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960).

3. Evelyn Hooker, "A Preliminary Analysis of Group Behavior of Homosexuals," The Journal of Psychology, 42 (1956), 217-225; Maurice Leznoff and William A. Westley, "The Homosexual Community," Social Problems, 4 (April, 1956), 257-263; H. Laurence Ross, "The 'Hustler' in Chicago," The Journal of Student Research, 1 (September, 1959) ; and Albert J. Reiss, Jr., "The Social Integration of Peers and Queers," Social Problems, 9 (Fall, 1961), 102-120.

4. Reiss, op. cit.

5. Charles Winick, "Physician Narcotic Addicts," Social Problems, 9 (Fall, 1961), 177.

6. Melville Dalton, Men Who Manage: Fusions of Feeling and Theory in Administration (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1959), p. 275.

7. Ned Polsky suggests, in a private communication, that one of the moral problems revolves around the scientist's involvement in illegal activity. Although I have not dealt with this point, I fully agree with his thoughts on the subject, which I reproduce here with his permission:
"If one is effectively to study law-breaking deviants as they engage in their deviance in its natural setting, i.e., outside of jail, he must make the moral decision that in some ways he will break the law himself. He need not be a 'participant observer' and commit the deviant acts under study. yet he has to witness such acts or be taken into confidence about them and not blow the whistle. That is, the investigator has to decide that when necessary he will 'obstruct justice' or be an 'accessory' before or after the fact, in the full legal sense of those terms. He will not be enabled to discern some vital aspects of criminally deviant behavior and the structure of lawbreaking subcultures unless he makes such a moral decision, makes the deviants believe him, and moreover convinces them of his ability to act in accord with his decision. The last-mentioned point can perhaps be neglected with juvenile delinquents, for they know that a professional studying them is almost always exempt from police pressure to inform; but adult criminals have no such assurance, and hence are concerned not merely with the investigator's intentions but with his sheer ability to remain a 'stand-up guy' under police questioning.
"Social scientists have rarely met these requirements. This is why, despite the fact that in America only about six of every hundred major crimes known to the police result in jail sentences, so much of our alleged sociological knowledge of criminality is based on study of people in jails. The sociologist, unable or unwilling to have himself defined by criminals in a way that would permit him to observe them as they ordinarily go about work and play, typically gathers his data from deviants who are jailed or otherwise enmeshed with the law—a skewed sample who overrepresent the nonprofessionals and bunglers, who are seen in artificial settings, and who are not systematically studied as they normally function in their natural settings. Thus the sociologist often knows less about truly contemporary deviant subcultures—particularly those composed of adult professional criminals—than the journalist does."

8. Herbert Blamer, "Society as Symbolic Interaction," in Arnold Rose, ,editor, Human Behavior and Social Processes: An lnteractionist Approach <Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), p. 188.

9. David Matza, "Subterranean Traditions of Youth," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 338 (November, 1961), 116-118.