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This paper develops an economic and social capital model linking single mothering in poverty to adolescent violence. Our model focuses on bonding social capital within parent-child relationships, negative social capital in delinquent peer groups, and bridging social capital residing in youths' friendship networks. Our research is the first to consider that the family experiences of adolescents' peers affect adolescent violence. We test hypotheses using the Add Health, finding that peer networks are a source of bridging social capital through which collective parenting helps explain youth violence as well as the links between family structural (dis)advantages and youth violence.

Scholars interested in delinquency have focused much attention on the influence of parent and peer relationships. Prior research has assumed that parents control delinquency because they value convention, whereas peers promote delinquency because they value and model nonconvention. We argue that it is important to assess the normative and behavioral orientations of those to whom adolescents feel close to accurately model how relationships operate. Drawing on social control, social learning, and a prominent developmental perspective, we derive and test alternative hypotheses about the manner in which attachments to significant others and the normative and behavioral orientations of these others operate either independently or in tandem to influence delinquency. Empirical findings based on tobit regressions and National Youth Survey (NYS) data suggest that social learning theory is best equipped to explain peer influence; however, the developmental perspective appears more applicable to parent influence.

This article explores how assumptions of determinacy and indeterminacy apply to general strain theory. Theories assuming determinacy assert that motivational conditions determine specific forms of deviant adaptations, whereas those assuming indeterminacy propose that a given social circumstance can predispose a person toward many forms of deviance. The authors propose that strain theory posits a strong tendency for the domains in which stresses occur to match those in which delinquency takes place. This is a source of determinacy. Drawing on stress spillover and aggression displacement arguments, the authors also discuss sources of indeterminacy--or domain crossover effects. The tendency toward domain matching that is tempered by stress spillover and aggression displacement is what the authors refer to as soft determinacy. The authors derive hypotheses from their soft determinacy argument and test them on a sample of middle school students. The results support the arguments and suggest that discussion of soft determinacy is worthy of further attention. (Contains 2 figures, 3 tables and 14 notes.)

Modern organizational changes purportedly intended to increase job satisfaction and reduce turnover are actually forms of social control. Analysis of data from 6,000 employees found that an unintended yet beneficial consequence of these changes is reduced sexual harassment. (Contains 60 references.) (SK)

In criminology, routine activities of potential victims can be used to predict victimization. Application to organizational sexual harassment data shows that organizational features (proximity in job location, supervisor or work group guardianship) and individual characteristics (target attractiveness) can predict sexual harassment victimization, but they do not support a routine activities approach. (SK)

We examine how incarcerated women introduced themselves to a reentry program focused on reuniting them with their children. To communicate maternal worthiness, the women did not discuss their own past mothering but focused instead on their mothers' mothering and on their future mothering. Our analysis uncovers two forms of identity talk women used to distance themselves from societal presumptions about their "bad" mothering: discussing shortcomings of their mothers in a process we call defensive (m)othering, and focusing on futures as good mothers through redemptive storytelling. These strategies reveal how women attempt to manage identities within structural, cultural, and situational constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how theorizing gender as a social system and a situational accomplishment provides a broad perspective that helps to synthesize many strands of theoretical and empirical research on IPV. We first address generalist claims that gendered explanations of IPV are not necessary. We next present a unifying feminist theoretical framework to explain IPV experiences and discuss how this framework can be extended to consider how gender and race systems intersect to influence IPV. We call for future theoretical development and empirical research that takes seriously a variety of intersecting systems and dimensions of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We assess Matsueda’s reflected appraisals model of delinquency across groups of previously delinquent and nondelinquent adolescents. We hypothesize that the reflected appraisals process, which entails incorporating informal appraisals by significant others into self-identities, differs across delinquent and nondelinquent adolescents. Method: We estimate cross-group models of the reflected appraisals process among delinquent and nondelinquent adolescents using the data (National Youth Survey) and methodology (structural equation modeling) from Matsueda’s original research. Results: The informal labeling and identity processes articulated in the reflected appraisals model better explain delinquency continuity than delinquency onset. Notable differences across previously delinquent and nondelinquent groups are found with respect to the influence of parental appraisals on reflected appraisals and with respect to the influence of race on parental and reflected appraisals. Conclusions: Informal labeling predicts both continuity and onset of delinquency. Continuity results from delinquent adolescents incorporating troublemaking appraisals into their self-identities and living up to those labels. Identity processes prove unimportant for linking troublemaking appraisals to delinquency among falsely appraised adolescents. Future research is needed to assess the possibility that false appraisals produce delinquency through processes articulated in general strain and defiance theories. We also discuss avenues for future research on race, identities, and delinquency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article spotlights racial microaggressions as relevant for understanding delinquency and the race gap in offending among middle-schoolers. In doing so, we draw on an emerging body of delinquency research rooted in general strain theory that demonstrates the emotional and behavioral tolls of faceto- face discrimination. We contend that this body of research has not established the full impact of racial microaggressions on delinquency because it has not considered that the specter of microaggressive encounters follows African American youth in particular from experience to experience. Specifically, we propose that racial microaggressions influence juvenile offending both directly--as previously documented--and by exacerbating the impact of co-occurring stressful events and experiences on negative emotions and delinquency. Using data collected at a southeastern middle-school, we find support for this proposition, empirically documenting that racial microaggressions interact with co-occurring stressful experiences in OLS models predicting delinquency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intersectionalities have become central to theory and research on sex, gender and crime. Viewing crime through an intersectionalities lens allows us to move beyond deterministic views of the relationship between social structures and offending by emphasizing that structures of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality weave together to create a complex tapestry of opportunities and motivations that shape variation in crime and violence across groups and situations. In this essay, we propose a “choice within constraint” framework that focuses on how multiple, interlocking inequalities come together to shape micro-level interactions while also allowing room for agency in how people choose to respond to social and structural opportunities and constraints. More specifically, we cull insights from qualitative studies to build a framework emphasizing how individuals’ active engagement with intersecting cultural meanings of gender (masculinities and femininities) explain variability in decisions to offend across and within hierarchies of sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their strain theory explanation for the gender gap in delinquency, Broidy and Agnew posit that the joint experience of anger and depression, which is more typical among females than males, should help explain gender differences in delinquency. The authors extend and test their claim using data from a southeastern middle school. Their findings show that females are more likely than males to experience anger and depression concomitantly and that the interaction between anger and depression is important for understanding the gender gap in delinquency. This is not because depression alleviates the impact of anger on delinquency among females, as suggested by gendered strain theory. Instead, depression exacerbates the effect of anger on delinquency among males. This article concludes that the key to understanding links between gender, emotions, and delinquency resides in gendered expressions of emotional responses to stress rather than in gendered experiences of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper integrates" arguments from differential social control theory with sociological research on mental health to develop an interactionist explanation of the relationship between law violation and depression. We focus on the possibility that law violation and depression are related because they share common antecedents, as well as the possibility that these problems mutually influence one another over time. We test hypotheses derived from our theoretical perspective using covariance structure analysis and panel data. Our results show that the relationship between law violation and depression can be explained largely by common antecedents--social-structural positions, stressful life events, and adolescent problems shape social relationships and identities, which together influence the likelihood of both early adulthood crime and depression. We also find limited support for mutual influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses two issues that have received little attention in empirical research--the mechanisms explaining variation in violent delinquency within gender and variation in levels of violence across gender, or the gender gap. Toward these ends, the article synthesizes arguments from differential association theory, feminist theory, and gender studies. The outcome is a theoretical model of gender and violent delinquency that focuses on the interplay between structural positions and cultural processes. The theoretical model includes a core construct of differential association theory--the learning of definitions favorable to violence--as well as arguments about cultural definitions or meanings of gender and gender differences in the role of familial controls and peer influence, which are derived from feminist theory and gender studies. It then examines how these cultural processes are conditioned by structural positions. One of the key arguments is that the violent delinquency of females is controlled through rather subtle, indirect mechanisms, while the violence of males is controlled in more direct, overt ways. The results of the empirical analysis support the theoretical arguments, contribute to the limited understanding of the variation in violent offending among females, and explain the sources of the gender gap in violent delinquency. The article thereby allows greater understanding of the broader phenomenon of juvenile violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]