The strengths of this mindset are its simplicity, applicability and brevity. It also doesn’t literally dictate what people should do, but rather acts as a guide. PD is also seen as a positive mindset, more than a model or theory. Examples of this are stealing, skipping school, picking your nose or other unacceptable behavior. People who exhibit negative deviance either reject a society’s norms, misinterpret the norms, or are completely oblivious to the norms. Negative deviance refers to behavior that does not meet the set and accepted norms in a social group. The labelling theory states that people start to exhibit deviant behavior as a result of the fact that people are given a certain identity and adopt this identity. Behavioral change is best achieved through practice and learning by doing.įigure 1 – The Positive Deviance Model What is negative deviance?Īccording to conflict theory, deviant behavior is the result of social, material or political inequality in a social group.The foundation of any PD approach rests on sustainability and the actions needed to enable a community to discover and solve their own problems.community members possess a collective intelligence, that is, evenly distributed across the community, which elicits a PD approach.Communities are self-organizing entities with sufficient human resources and other resources to find solutions to shared problems.Community members have the solutions and expertise to best address their own problems.The strengths-based approach is based on five principles: The PD approach has since been widely used by researchers for development purposes. Some researchers then suggested using knowledge from these parents to plan feeding programs and save the children. Researchers found that, despite the severe poverty in a community, some families had better-fed children than others. The concept of Positive Deviance (PD) originated in the 1970s, when it started in nutritional research and case study.

Do you want unlimited ad-free access and templates? Find out more What is positive deviance?

Define deviancy theory