Deficiency and Delinquency: An Interpretation of Mental TestingMiner, James Burt
Science
Deficiency and Delinquency: An Interpretation of Mental Testing
Miner, James Burt
Children with mental disabilities; Juvenile delinquents; Mentally ill offenders; Psychological tests
Dr. Bronner has made a careful study with Binet tests of a younger group
of randomly selected girls at the Cook County Detention Home which is
connected with the juvenile court at Chicago. The group included 133
girls 10-17 years of age inclusive, who were held awaiting a hearing or
were temporarily cared for in the detention home. The Binet tests were
given to all who did not show clearly that they were of passable
mentality by completing the sixth grade or above without retardation,
and passing school tests in long division and writing from dictation. A
14-year-old child “passing all the 10-year-old tests and some, but not
all, of the 12-year-old tests,” was regarded as doubtful. She was not
classed as feeble-minded without further testing and study. Dr. Bronner
does not state her criterion for the borderline with the younger
children, but we may judge that her borderline was more likely than ours
to have classed a child in the presumably deficient group. Her summary
shows only 15 girls “probably feeble-minded” (11.2%), and 2 others
“possibly” so. From her description we may suppose that the “probable”
group were comparable with our test standard of presumably deficient,
plus perhaps a few conative cases.
Mention should also be made of the work of Dr. Bronner to which we
referred under the earnings of the mentally retarded (_6_). This group
of 30 randomly selected delinquent women at a local detention home in
New York tested, with two or three possible exceptions, no lower than a
similar group of women servants who had never been offenders. Her data
do not enable us to determine how many would fall below our borderlines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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