WHAT IS THE HEAVEN DELINQUENCY STUDY?
AIM AND HYPOTHESIS
This study aimed to find out if psychoticism, extraversion, or self-esteem affected delinquency. Heaven hypothesised that all three predicted delinquency.
SAMPLE AND PROCEDURE
The participants of this study were from two independent catholic schools in New South Wales, Australia. He had 282 adolescents in total (146 females and 136 males) with their ages ranging from thirteen to fifteen. Heaven had three questionnaires for each participant to fill out and the first step he took was to check all three had internal reliability (stayed consistent) and, apart from the psychoticism scale, they all scored well.
Participants were followed up after two years and 80% of participants responded.
RESULTS
In testing the mean delinquency by gender, males were more likely to engage in delinquent behaviour. When they were tested in correlation coefficents for delinquency and personality type variable, it showed a positive correlation between delinquency and psychoticism at both times. Extraversion had a positive correlation with delinquency only the second time and it was a weak correlation. The results Heaven received generally supported other cross-sectional studies completed previously. These studies had shown strong correlations between psychoticism and varying forms of anti-social or criminal behaviour.