Learning Tables: Crime and Deviance

We’ve just started filming for a new series of crime and deviance films (the long-awaited follow-up volume to our original Shortcuts to Crime and Deviance films – a welcome change to be creating sociology films after 3 years spent focusing on psychology films – and in the process of searching for Robert Agnew pics (one of the films examines Strain Theory, both Merton’s original formulation and Agnew’s General Strain Theory developments) I came across some interesting examples of “Learning Tables” and decided to spend a bit of time looking into the idea (“research is research”, after all. And also because I can).

I’m assuming they were originally designed to be a form of revision exercise or as a way of condensing notes and observations about a particular topic (the examples I originally found were all for crime and deviance) but since the author information is, at best, sketchy I’ve no real way of knowing – or acknowledging the original authors in any meaningful way.

Be that as it may, the basic idea behind the tables is a relatively simple one: information across a range of themes (basic ideas, evaluation, synoptic links…) is condensed to fit an A4 sized table format.

My curiosity piqued by the Learning Tables I originally chanced upon (they were numbered 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13 and 14 so I assumed there must be others around) I decided to see if I could find them – and while I found a couple of similar variations on the Learning Table theme, no further examples were forthcoming.

However, if your curiosity is similarly piqued you can download the Tables I did find:

• primary quantitative measures of crime
• crime, deviance and ethnicity
• crime, deviance and gender
• labelling theory
• left realism
• consensus theories
• traditional Marxism / radical criminology
• marxist theories
• non-sociological explanations
• suicide

As far as I can tell the original files date from 2006 – 2010 so you might need to update some of the information (easy enough because they’re all in Word format).

Alternatively, if you’re inspired to make your own (or, better still, setting your students to work making them) there’s a blank template you can use.

Thank you.

Oh. And Merry Xmas.