Intelligence of Juvenile Delinquents: An Empirical Study

The study was conducted on the sample of 200 male adolescents drawn equally from delinquent and non-delinquent group. Delinquents (100) consisted of those who had violated the law and were lodged in the observation homes. The non-delinquents counterparts (N=100) consisted of those who had not committed any crimes. The subjects selected for the two samples were compared with each other in terms of their intelligence score. General Intelligence Test (GIT) developed by S.M. Mohsin (1990) was used to assess the level of verbal intelligence of subjects under study. The statistical comparison of different groups of delinquents and non-delinquents with each other in terms of their level of intelligence revealed that all the groups of delinquents were not found to differ significantly between themselves in terms of their intelligence scores but they differed significantly with their non-delinquent counterparts. Although, it was found that delinquents and non-delinquents differed significantly in terms of their intelligence indicating that delinquents had lower intellectual abilities than those of the non-delinquents group.