medium · MCAT psych-soc
A sociologist studies why a neighborhood with high residential turnover and ethnic heterogeneity shows elevated crime rates even after controlling for the poverty of individual residents. She attributes the pattern to the community's diminished capacity for informal control rather than to the characteristics of the people living there.
Which theoretical claim does her interpretation most precisely invoke, and how does it differ from a strain-theory account of the same data?
- Social disorganization's loss of collective efficacy, locating the cause in weakened neighborhood ties rather than in blocked individual goals as strain theory does
- Differential association's transmission of deviant norms via learned peer interaction, locating the cause in group learning rather than in blocked opportunity
- Labeling theory's secondary deviance from stigmatizing social reactions and official sanctioning, locating the cause in societal response rather than the goal-means gaps
- Routine activities' convergence of motivated offenders and suitable targets under weak guardianship, locating the cause in situational opportunity rather than structural anomie
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