How did the history of and assumptions made by differential association and social learning perspectives impact their development?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Differential association grew out of the ethnographic work of the Chicago school whose adherents studied how new immigrant groups accepted or adapted social norms (including laws) in their new adopted home country of the United States. By examining different areas of the city of Chicago, certain neighborhoods were more prone to crime than others. Shaw and McKay (1942) argued that procriminal values are transmitted from generation to generation in a process called cultural transmission. This is important for the assumptions made by these theories.
Theories in this area all share a tabula rasa (“blank slate”) conception of human nature. In other words, people are essentially products of their learning histories and interactions with others. People may be different from one another in superficial ways, but all people learn to commit crime (or obey the law) from observing and interacting with other people. These theories are clearly positivist theories in the sense that they assume that criminals and noncriminals can be distinguished from each other. They are also determinist because they assume that behavior is determined by factors beyond one’s control, such as social factors that involve interactions and connections with friends, peers, family, and relatives.