NewDawn wrote:
Seems like journalists are confusing correlation and causation here. This is what the researchers had to say about it:
We didn't expect this result (none of them believed that music preference had anything to do with delinquency) and were surprised ourselves. But once again: listening to death metal, hip hop or techno house doesn't make you a criminal, nor does it cause criminal behaviour. A *possible* explanation is that *some* of these kids get involved with a group of friends that are already involved in minor delinquency and are influenced by them. That means it's not the music causing the delinquency, but a social factor.
How about expanding on that with the notion that those groups of friends may belong to subcultures that listen to music genres
as part of their subculture?
A problem I have with the study as described in the PDF, is the arbitrary grouping of music genres into 5 subtypes:
Quote:
In Europe and North America, adolescents listen mainly to 4 or 5 different music styles: conventional, mainstream pop music (eg, chart pop); intense and rebellious rock (eg, rock, heavy metal, emo, gothic, punk); rhythmic and soulful African American or African Caribbean music (eg, blues, soul, hip-hop, rhythm and blues [R&B], reggae); highly energetic dance music
(eg, house, trance, techno, hardhouse); and complex highbrow music (eg, classical music, jazz, singer-songwriter).
Aside from how eclectic the 'African-American' and rock subtypes are in the range of genres they each cover (you'll listen to blues if you listen to reggae?), there is a rather obvious implication of social class in the 'highbrow music' subcategory. You'll be less likely to have immediate EXPOSURE to Chopin or Bach if you're an 8-year-old kid in a poor household; but there's no telling whether or not you'll end up loving it if you eventually come across it.
Aside from that, I'm not sure what singer-songwriters are doing in a 'highbrow' category, since these days, anyone who can pick up a guitar and rhyme 'true' with 'blue', calls themselves a singer-songwriter.
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