Analyzing Sociological Theories of Social Deviations

This paper attempts to explain the factors affecting the deviations on the one hand through Biological and psychological theories and on the other hand through sociological theories and also attempts to explain their failures and criticisms. Biological approaches focus on physical and biological factors like body inferiorities, particular features of body organs, brainpan form chromosome disorders as deviance determinants. The major criticisms on this approach is that it does not consider the social, economic, and political factors and there is no enough documents proving that all deviants have the same biological characteristics. Psychological approach focuses on individualistic differences based on Psychological factors like intelligence and personality type and for finding the causes and effective factors of deviant behaviors they focus on personal features like personality disorders, anger, anxiety, and depression and so on. The major criticism on psychosocial view in particular Freud’s psychoanalysis is its lack of testability. Since psychological explanations are subjective and are not using the objective measures which are not accepted by scientific methodologies. Sociological approaches such as Durkheim's Anomie theory, Merton's strain theory, differential opportunity theory, differential association theory, social association theory, and conflict theory claim that the deviant behaviors are neither originated from individualistic differences nor physical and genetic characteristics, but the deviances are created from social, economic and political pressures on individuals. They mostly focus on the roles of structures, institutions, processes, and social factors impacting on individuals’ behavior.