Empirical Status of Social Learning

http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/files/l/l3Bguk/Empirical%20Status%20of%20Social%20Learning%20Theory%20of%20Crime%20and%20Deviance.pdf 

This scholarly article, called "Empirical Status of Social Learning Theory of Crime and Deviance: The Past, Present, and Future", has been written by Ronald L. Akers, from the University of Florida and by Gary F. Jensen, from the Vanderbilt University. This paper has two main goals. As told by the authors in the introduction, "The first goal is to review the empirical research evidence on the validity of social learning theory as an explanation of criminal and deviant behavior." Also stated by them, the second goal of the paper is to " illuminate new directions for expanding, elaborating, and testing the theory in the future." In short, what this means is that through their article, they cover the models of social structure as well as those of social learning. The article also discusses that the social learning theory (the main topic), when elaborated, can account for criminological and sociological regularities. It reviews the social learning theory, the research on social learning variables, the future of social learning in criminology, the imitation, contagion and auto-correlation, the conceptual overlap with the organizational theory, the separable effects of structure and culture, the multiple cultural processes and forms, the countervailing mechanisms, the modeling of occupational structure, and concludes with comments on the elaboration of social learning theory at the macro level.

Carl Paquet