Tübingen young offender comparative investigation
The Tübingen young offender comparative investigation (TJVU) was started in 1965 and was the first large-scale longitudinal criminological investigation in Germany. It was initiated by Hans Göppinger and followed up by 2001. Their results can be assigned to developmental criminology. In addition to the quantitative (statistical) evaluation, a qualitative evaluation of the TJVU was also carried out with the significant participation of Michael Bock , which led to the method of ideal-typical comparative individual case analysis (MIVEA) .
Research approach
In the 1960s, the dominance of psychiatry in German criminology was heavily criticized. Even Hans Göppinger, himself a psychiatrist, no longer considered the psychiatric explanations of criminal behavior sufficient and decided on a multi-dimensional research approach. That is why representatives of various scientific disciplines were involved in the TJVU: sociology , psychology , social work , medicine , law .
Thus, it was not pursued individual criminological hypotheses , but all facets of the life story of the test subjects examined. This resulted in a detailed description of the actions of offenders in their social context.
The multi-dimensional approach brought Göppinger and his team the accusation of lack of theory. But the confirmation or justification of a theory was avowedly not the aim of the TJVU. It was about gaining criminological experience.
The setting of the investigation
The TJVU consists of two samples drawn at random. A so-called prisoner group (H-test persons) consisted of 200 male prisoners from the then state penal institution Rottenburg am Neckar (regional court district Tübingen ), who were between 20 and 30 years old. The comparison group (V test subjects) was formed from 200 young men who lived in the catchment area of the Rottenburg prison. These men were a representative group of non-prisoners, some with criminal records.
Examination result
The outstanding research result of the TJVU is that the members of the prisoner group and the comparison group did not differ significantly in areas such as origin, socialization conditions, education and social status. However, when dealing with the given social conditions, the actions of H-subjects and V-subjects differed considerably.
Follow-up examinations
Under the direction of Hans-Jürgen Kerner , the TJVU was re-examined in several waves - most recently in 1995. The Tübingen criminologists Wolfgang Stelly and Jürgen Thomas worked up the life stories of all TJVU test subjects again until 2001. Thus, their résumés were reconstructed until the middle of the fifth decade of life. As a result, the assumptions of the theory of the four bonds and the inflection point approach of Sampson and Laub were confirmed.
literature
- Imanuel Baumann: On the trail of crime. A history of criminology and criminal politics in Germany 1880 to 1980 , Göttingen 2006. ISBN 3-8353-0008-3
- Michael Bock : Kriminologie , 4th edition, Munich 2013. ISBN 978-3-8006-4705-7
- Hans Göppinger : The perpetrator in his social relations. Results from the Tübingen comparative study of young offenders , Berlin - Heidelberg - New York - Tokyo 1983 (in collaboration with Michael Bock, Jörg-Martin Jehle , Werner Maschke). ISBN 3-540-12518-3
- Hans Göppinger: Kriminologie , 6th edition, Munich 2008, (edited by Michael Bock). ISBN 978-3-406-55509-1
- Wolfgang Stellny, Jürgen Thomas: Crime in the life course. A reanalysis of the Tübingen young offender comparative study (TJVU) , University of Tübingen 2005. ISBN 3-937368-18-3