Emotional maturity and family environment of criminal

Pages: 410-414
L. N. Bunker and Shilpa Chouhan (Department of Psychology, Jai Narain Vyas University, Jodhpur, Rajasthan)

Female crime is the important factor that influences family’s harmony and emotional stability. In recent years, the female crime rate has been a gradual increase, and its growth rate has exceeded that of male crime in the corresponding period. This not only relates with the weakly legal consciousness of a small number of women, but also relates with the families and the society. The study examines the emotional maturity and family environment of criminal and non-criminal women. This is a field study in which purposive sampling technique was used for selecting 25 criminal females and the other 25 non -criminal females were randomly selected. The tools used for data collection were Emotional Maturity Scale by Singh and Bhargava (1999) Hindi Version and Family Environment Scale revised by Joshi and Vyas (1987) Hindi version. t-test was used as statistical technique to analyze the data. The findings reveal that there is statistically significant difference between the emotional maturity of criminal and non-criminal females. On the measures of emotional maturity and subscales only personality disintegration dimension/sub-scale significant difference was found among criminal and non-criminal women. This reveals that criminals often possess a type of personality trait like reaction, phobias formation, rationalization, pessimism, immorality, etc. On the measures of family environment and its subscales significance difference was found on Conflict, Moral Religious Emphasis and Organization .The finding on correlation between emotional maturity and family environment indicate that there was a positive association .Thus, it can be concluded that emotional maturity and family environment affect behaviour of criminal females.