Theory Integration: General Premise and the Weaknesses and Strengths

Theory Integration Essay
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Many criminological theories emphasize particular processes or factors that delineate criminality or crime distribution. For instance, differential association theory emphasizes how people interact with their peers or primary groups to define the processes through which they learn definitions that favor criminality, consequently leading to criminal behavior. On the other hand, theoretical constructs within the strain convention emphasize social structure's role in creating conditions that cause strain and the need to adapt. Once articulated, the theories above compete with other supposedly valid rationales to establish the specific combination of propositions or constructs that may account for criminal behaviors effectively. Therefore, the primary premise of theory integration is to merge these ideas into a specific theoretical explanation that is superior to the respective model's rationales. The paper also delineates the strengths and weaknesses of theoretical integration.
General Premise of Theory Integration
The general premise of theory integration is rather straightforward. Suppose the researcher has more than one model they can merge with ideas from another to create an innovative model that offers the rationale for theory integration. Integration is realized based on the convergence amongst various causal arguments in diverse criminology theories. The primary objective is to establish commonalities between or among theories to generate a synthesized understanding that is superior to any of the respective theories. The concept also relates to combining different logically interconnected schemes into a larger class of hypotheses to offer an increasingly inclusive rationale for a specific phenomenon. This theory integration premise is superior to the others because it recognizes that logically interconnected propositions create the foundation for establishing when contributing theories can be successfully integrated (Krohn & Eassey, 2014).
Theory integration is an approach to address the limitations of existing criminological theories, such as their capacity to downplay the stability between criminality as well as other kinds of delinquent behavioral tendencies, their forsaking of antisocial behavior steadiness across an individual's lifespan, and their inability to recognize psychological and biological factors. In this context, it was necessary to integrate situational and developmental theories of criminality or, rather, offending. Within this framework, developmental researchers were inherently limited in their inability to recognize the influence of situational factors on offending, whereas situational researchers failed to recognize the basis for long-term individual discrepancies in the potential for offending. This led to the development of the integrated cognitive antisocial potential (ICAP) theory which merged ideas from different models, including cognitive decision-making processes as well as potential antisocial constructs (Farrington, 2019). ...