Brandon Welsh, director of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, is diving into the study’s history in his new book.
The Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study was a pioneering study in the field of criminology, one that is worth examining.
Brandon Welsh , the Dean’s Professor of Criminology in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University, wrote a book examining the history of this type of criminological evaluation and the life of Richard Cabot, the study’s founder and first director.
“Between Medicine and Criminology: Richard Cabot and the Making of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study” looks at the study and how it came to be along with the key players. It was written with two other scholars who’ve worked with Welsh on the study.
“At root, (the goal) was to write the first book about the making of this study,” Welsh said. “This was a bread-and-butter study, learning about life course developments and effects. … This is our effort to peel back and try to understand the individuals at play, most prominently Richard Clarke Cabot.”
The 1935 study, meant to look at delinquency prevention methods among young Massachusetts boys, was, according to Welsh, the first randomized controlled experiments in criminology and one of the earliest randomized experiments of a social program. And with multiple followups over the years, it’s one of the earliest examples of a longitudinal-experimental study of criminological outcomes.
Cabot was the first director of the study that officially started in June 1939. The study took 506 “pre-delinquent” boys from Cambridge and Somerville between the ages of 5 and 13 and enrolled some in an intervention program. The goals of the study were to see what could help prevent delinquency and to follow the boys into adulthood to look at the long-term impact, Welsh said.
The boys received counseling from case workers who took them on trips, tutored them, and got them enrolled in summer camps. Boys in the control group did not receive these services.
The program ended in 1945. There were several followups after that, the first being in 1948, with other ones happening in 1956 and 1975.
The 1975 assessment by criminologist Joan McCord “famously found” that the program was harmful in the long term after having null effects in the beginning, Welsh said, with many of the participants involved in the intervention program having a higher chance of committing more than one crime, dying before age 35, finding their work unsatisfactory, suffering from stress-related disorders, alcoholism or mental illness.
Welsh is the current director of the study and has completed the first of two phases of the 70-year follow-up of participants—extending well into old age.
The book touches on the 30-year followup by McCord and the hypotheses as to why the study had this effect. Welsh said he zeroed in on the “peer deviancy hypothesis,” which is the idea that the boys receiving interventions were influenced by the older peers they met at camp.
“It was a lot to do with unstructured supervision,” Welsh said. “They’re left to their own devices in these summer camps. There’s this mixing of kids: some starting to become really hardcore delinquents with some who are very impressionable. This finding and explanation has really held.”
In addition to looking at McCord’s findings, Welsh looks at Cabot and his history in clinical medicine. Cabot’s work in this field helped him eventually bring the same style of trials used in medicine to the social sciences.
During research for the book, Welsh dove into archives that shed light on the study and its process, including Cabot’s “novel design” where the boys were matched in pairs and randomly allocated to treatment and control groups.
Welsh also found Cabot was focused on prevention in the first insance, which was unusual for the time.
“He was ahead of his time on so many things, and for us this book was a reminder of that,” he said.