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
The Binet scale in its various forms provides only part of the objective
evidence as to the mental inferiority of delinquents, although it
affords the best means at present of interpreting the borderline of
deficiency. Among the other investigations in which psychological tests
have been tried with delinquents in comparison with normal subjects, the
recent study of the Mentality of the Criminal Women by Weidensall is the
most important so far as estimating the frequency of deficiency is
concerned (_60_). It affords an admirable check upon our conclusions
from the Binet examinations, since she gives in detail the results with
a random group of 88 women inmates of the Bedford (N. Y.) Reformatory,
which is quite comparable with the group of 200 which she tested with
the Binet scale, and which we have already considered.
For our purpose, the most important comparisons are those between the
group of women in the reformatory and the group of 15-year-old
Cincinnati working girls tested by Woolley with the same tests.
Weidensall's Table 92 shows for three tests the percentages of the
Bedford women who tested below the lowest 1% of these girls. For the
opposites test, 20% were below this borderline; for a test on the
completion of sentences, 12%; for the memory span for digits, 29%. She
also shows that 17% of the delinquent group were poorer than any of the
working girls and 30.7% as poor as the poorest 5.7% of these working
girls, when their mentality is measured by the number of the tests in
which their ability is at or above that of the median working girl of
fifteen. This 30.7% is probably most nearly comparable in ability with
the lowest 0.5% of the general population.
Kelley's monograph on Mental Aspects of Delinquency, to which reference
was made in the last chapter, gives the results with boys in the Texas
Juvenile Training School for the completion test and his own
construction test, as well as for a number of physical measurements,
sensory and motor tests. He has used various data from which to provide
norms for comparison. In connection with the Psychopathic Institute at
the Chicago Juvenile Court, Healy and Fernald (_125_) have published an
elaborate series of tests with suggestions as to how they may be
employed for analyzing a child's mental ability and estimating his
mental capacity. Schmidt has partially standardized these tests (_178_).
Guy G. Fernald (_15_) tried out a dozen different tests and recommends
seven of them for testing delinquents who are of adolescent age or
older. Haines has sought the diagnostic value with girl delinquents of a
dozen tests including Fernald's test of moral judgment. Weidensall
(_218_), Smedley (_51_), Rowland (_49_), Porteus (_45_), and Whipple and
Fraser (_220_, p. 663), have published results with certain tests tried
with delinquents. With none of these tests can we adequately define the
borderline of feeble-minded intellects.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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