Het relativiteitsprobleem van afwijkend gedrag

Samenvatting

A study in the definition of deviant behavior, based on a survey made in a Dutch province. The survey covered almost 3,000 families, and was founded on an examination of documents and on interviews. The % of 'soc'ly unadapted families' varied from place to place within the general limits of 0.5 to 5%. Lack of social adaptation expressed itself in various ways: alcoholism, criminality, deviant sexual behavior, etc. Contrary to the hypothesis of V. Litjens (in Onmaatschappelijke gezinnen, Unsocial Behavior, 1953) that typically 'unsocial' families were to be found only in the lowest social strata, the survey located such families in all such strata, thus drawing attention to a problem which the published research on 'unsocial behavior' touched, if at all, only tangentially: the relation between 'SS' and 'actual behavior' (role). The solution adopted was to distinguish between the 'socially unadapted' of the lowest strata, where social position and actual behavior coincided and the 'not conforming' (ie to their social position), of the other strata, where there was no coincidence. I. Langnas.