Accidents and Social Deviance

Based on the theory that one of the functions of social control is to protect the individual from potentially harmful acts and situations, it was hypothesized that the rejection of social constraints would result in a higher incidence of accidental injuries. This hypothesis was tested by analyzing the frequency of accidental injuries among representative samples of 1,067 high school and 495 college students in relation to a wide variety of measures of deviant behavior, attitudes, and self-image obtained through personal interviews and self-administered questionnaires. Statistically significant relationships were found between the frequency of accidental injuries and a wide range of social factors indicative of deviance.