ABSTRACT
Any social phenomenon so disturbing and so widespread as the more serious forms of juvenile delinquency is bound to arouse a great deal of speculation and a certain amount of research regarding its causes. Most problems of social causation concern not the presence or absence of a phenomenon, but the more or the less, the multiplicity or scarcity of the phenomenon, the manner and extent of its distribution. Getting down to the precise causation of individual cases is therefore not feasible, and we must be content with the conclusion that under stipulated conditions a quite considerable incidence of delinquency is highly probable. The "less" in this situation is the tendency to delinquency in a previous period over this wide range, the "more" is the incidence over that range today.
