Where does deviance collide?

In sociology and criminology, deviance is behavior that violates the shared norms of a group and draws a reaction, from a raised eyebrow to an arrest. Becker's 1963 Outsiders argued that deviance is not a quality of the act itself but a label: social groups create deviance by making rules and applying them to particular people, so the same behavior may or may not count as deviant depending on who reacts and how. Durkheim had earlier held that a certain amount of deviance is normal and even functional, because punishing it marks out the boundary of acceptable conduct for everyone else. The referent is a socially judged departure from a norm, not a number summarising how badly a statistical model fits, and not a person who quietly outperforms peers.[1]

Unit

One norm-violating act or actor, judged deviant by a group's reaction

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Recorded through official sanctions, self-report surveys, and observation of who gets labelled and punished

In statistics, the deviance is a number that measures how badly a fitted generalized linear model matches the data. Nelder and Wedderburn's 1972 Generalized Linear Models defined it as twice the difference in log-likelihood between the fitted model and a saturated model that reproduces the data exactly, making it the generalized-linear-model counterpart of the residual sum of squares in ordinary regression. A smaller deviance means a closer fit, the drop in deviance between nested models can be tested for significance, and per-observation deviance residuals show where the fit is poor. The referent is a scalar lack-of-fit statistic computed from likelihoods, not a norm violation judged by a society, and not a high performer studied for lessons.[2]

Unit

Twice the log-likelihood gap from the saturated model, a single non-negative number

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Computed from the fitted and saturated log-likelihoods, and decomposed into deviance residuals per observation

In public health and development, positive deviance is an asset-based approach that looks for the few individuals or families who, facing the same constraints and resources as their neighbours, already achieve markedly better outcomes. Marsh, Schroeder, Dearden, and the Sternins' 2004 The power of positive deviance in the BMJ described studying these outliers, for example mothers whose children stay well nourished in a poor community, to uncover uncommon but workable practices that others nearby can adopt. Here the departure from the norm is a good thing to be found and spread, not a wrongdoing to be sanctioned. The referent is a beneficial outlier and the method built around it, not a social offence, and not a model-fit statistic.[3]

Unit

A better-than-expected performer under shared constraints, plus the practices they reveal

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by comparing outcomes against peers with the same resources, then studying what the outliers do differently