Psychological Correlates of Behaviour in Seriously Delinquent Juveniles

¹ Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.

This report presents the method and initial findings of a multi-phase investigation of the behaviour, personality patterns and background factors in two groups of male adolescents institutionalized for a wide variety of state and federal law violations. The methodology is discussed in some detail, since it is an empirical one, emphasizing phenomenology and eliminating theoretical and impressionistic factors as much as possible. The major findings are:

1. Behavioural characteristics of the population can be statistically grouped into five major traits, each of which is internally consistent, distinct from other traits and representative of a significant portion of the boys studied.

2. Each of these behaviour traits can be defined in terms of its statistical association with certain personality measures, the M.M.P.I. and the Leary Inter-personal Checklist. Each instrument was used in a complementary fashion to describe the entire population and to provide comparative distinctions between the behaviour traits.

3. The findings thus far indicate a striking heterogeneity, in terms of behavioural and personality patterns, in the highly preselected population studied, clearly implying a need for an increased flexibility in the diagnosis, treatment and understanding of the so-called "juvenile delinquent".

4. The results are such as to encourage further use of this empirical and inductive method toward a delineation of the causal relationships between behaviour-personality patterns and recent and remote past life events.