who had not been arrested as adults (Herrnstein, 1995, p.41).
Many theorists have offered the broken home as one of the most common explanations for juvenile delinquency. Nonetheless, in a 1991 study, Wells & Rankin concluded that the support for this theory was as yet incomplete and inconclusive. Consequently, they undertook a study to develop a "systematic, quantitative, integrative assessment of existing research" on the relationship between broken homes and delinquency (Wells & Rankin, 1991, p. 81). But rather than the usual narrative research review that interprets and judges the scope and conclusions of prior studies, Wells & Rankin (1991) applied a meta-analytic approach that relied on quantitative methods to systematically summarize and analyze the results of multiple independent studies of a given topic (p. 81).
Wells & Rankin's meta-analysis targeted the broken home as the structural issue that causes juvenile delinquency and crime (1991, p. 82). Specifically, they sought to determine the following the overall associa
...