"Our primary aim is to discover how some social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in the society to engage in nonconforming rather that conforming conduct. If we can locate groups peculiarly subject to such pressures, we should expect to find fairly high levels of deviant behaviour in these groups, not because the human beings comprising them are compounded of distinctive biological tendencies, but because they are responding to the social situation in which they find themselves"(Merton, 1957 p. 186).

American sociologist, Robert Merton has become one of the worlds most cited theorist in the study of deviance.

Born in 1910, in the slums of South Philadelphia, Merton received a scholarship attend Temple University, following his education at Temple, Merton won a graduate assistantship to Harvard, where he later went on to teach at the renowned University, (Lilly, 2002). In 1938, while teaching at Harvard, Merton published his book, "Social...