The Multiple Factor Theory Evaluated

In one line

The multiple factor theory is an accurate description of what is found in real cases and a poor theory of why crime happens, and its modern form, risk factor research, keeps the accuracy while trying to supply the missing mechanism.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the relevance and applicability of the Multiple Factor Theory lie in its realism, its resistance to ideology and its usefulness to sentencing and treatment; its defects are that it lists without weighting, describes without explaining, cannot be refuted, and confuses correlation with causation.

The merits

One: it corresponds to the evidence. Every serious study, from Healy to the Gluecks to modern longitudinal research, finds several conditions operating in each case and none universal. A theory should fit the data before it is elegant.

Two: it resists the overclaim that is this discipline's besetting sin. The history in Module I is a series of single-factor theories each of which was asserted too confidently and each of which failed. The multiple factor approach is a standing corrective.

Three: it is what a practitioner needs. A magistrate, a probation officer and a prison officer each face one person with one history. The approach directs attention to what is actually in that history.

Four: it supports individualised sentencing. If the combination varies, then the response must be assessed case by case, which is the reformative principle and is now embedded in Indian sentencing practice through the requirement of psychiatric, psychological and social material before a sentence is fixed.

Five: it is honest about uncertainty. Criminology cannot say which individual will offend. The approach admits it. Single-factor theories conceal it and are therefore more dangerous when applied to people.

The defects

One: a list is not a theory. It states no mechanism, so it cannot say how the factors combine or in what order they operate.

Two: the factors are unweighted. One hundred and seventy conditions with no ranking gives no guidance about where to intervene. If a State can fund one programme, the approach does not say which.

Three: it cannot be refuted, and a proposition that no observation can contradict is not scientific.

Four: it confuses correlation with causation, and it confuses direction. Poor school performance is associated with delinquency; the offending may be the cause of the poor performance rather than its effect, or both may follow from something else.

Five: it treats factors as additive when they interact. Two conditions may have no effect apart and a large effect together. The chapter on biological typologies gave an example: a genetic susceptibility that raises risk only among those maltreated in childhood. A list cannot represent that.

Six: it can excuse everything. If nine factors are present in every offender's file, and the same nine are present in millions of non-offenders, then citing them explains nothing and can be used to explain any conduct after the fact.