A Historical Big Data Analysis to Understand the Social Construction of Juvenile Delinquency in the United States

Abstract

Social construction is a theoretical position that social reality is created through the humans' definition and interaction as opposed to something that exists by default. As one type of social reality, juvenile delinquency is perceived as part of social problems, deeply contextualized and socially constructed in American society. The social construction of juvenile delinquency started far earlier than the first juvenile court in 1899 in the U.S. Scholars have tried traditional historical analysis to explore the timeline of the social construction of juvenile delinquency in the past, but it is inefficient to examine hundred years of documents using traditional paper-pencil documenting method. We propose to research, develop and apply image and text analysis methods to analyze hundreds of years of newspaper data and show a clear development of social construction of juvenile delinquency in American society. The project aims to explore questions around how the media started depicting certain types of juvenile behavior as delinquency, how they described those behaviors; who are those juveniles (age, race, gender, family background, community background, etc.), how other social institutions treat those juveniles in those stories; how the depiction of juvenile delinquency has changed during the past 100 years; whether the analysis results support social construction perspective in terms of juvenile delinquency or not. In this paper, we present our ongoing work of doing image analysis on the newspaper collection from the Library of Congress Chronicling America website, initial results, observations, current conclusions, and future work.