Social Representations and Comparative Network Analysis: A Preliminary Report

Resumo

The present study uses a version of network analysis to examine the "social representations" of a group of criminologists from America and Britain about crime. The results suggests that while criminologists acknowledge the importance of broken families and lack of parental control, they perceive them as resulting from unemployment and poverty. The two groups of criminologists produce surprisingly dissimilar networks for the perceived causes of crime, and thus we would argue different social representations of crime. The most significant differences were related to the role of racial problems, with significantly more American criminologists believing it to be important in its bi-directional causal relationship with unemployment and poverty and its causal impact upon media depictions of crime.