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
Certain other groups of women and girls have been examined with the
Binet or other tests, but the results are of little significance for
judging the problem of deficiency objectively, since the individuals
were either selected for examination because they were thought to be
abnormal mentally or because there are not adequate norms for
determining the borderlines with the particular tests used. At the New
York State Training School for Girls in Hudson, we find that 208
selected cases who were not profiting by their training were examined
with the 1911 scale. They ranged in life-age from 12 to 20. We cannot
determine how many were under 14 years of age, or how much effect might
have been produced by selecting dull cases; but 44 tested IX or under
and 52 tested X (_158_). Dr. Spaulding (_183_) used Binet and other
psychological tests on a group of 400 inmates of the Massachusetts
Reformatory for Women at South Framingham; but she gives only her
judgment based on the examination and history of the cases so that we
have no data on this group for comparison. Her statement that 16.8%
showed “marked mental defect, _i. e._, the moron group” and 26.8% showed
“mental subnormality (slight mental defect)” is an excellent
illustration of the best type of subjective judgment on consecutive
cases, since she is familiar with test results. For her purpose of
deciding how to care for the women it is of undoubted value, but for
comparative purposes it is clear that it is impossible to tell how her
subjective opinion would agree with that of an equally competent
diagnostician, or what is meant by her terms “feeble-minded” or
“subnormal.” For scientific purposes the Binet results for her group
would be of much value, for we should like to know whether the
conditions at Bedford are typical among the women's reformatories for
the older offenders.
Dr. Rowland used psychological tests other than the Binet scale with a
group of 35 at the Bedford Reformatory for Women, but there are no
adequate norms for the comparison of her results with the general
conditions (_49_). Baldwin (_1_) has shown that delinquent colored
girls, 13 to 21 years of age, in the girls' division of the Pennsylvania
Reformatory school at Sleighton Farm are inferior to white girls in the
same institution in a learning test. As cited by Gruhle (_121_), Cramer
(_10_) used an Ebbinghaus completion test, definition tests, etc. with
376 delinquent girls in Hanover, but there are no borderlines for
comparison. As cited by Bronner, von Grabe gave several psychological
tests to 62 prostitutes treated in the city hospital in Hamburg and
compared them with a control group of 30 (_6_).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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