NCJ Number
199713
Date Published
January 2004
Length
10 pages
Annotation
This research is the first step in determining whether domestic
violence, as it commonly occurs in community samples, is related
to other forms of deviance in a manner consistent with a general
deviance explanation of domestic violence.
Abstract
Data were obtained from the National Youth Survey (NYS), which
involved a national probability sample of continental U.S.
households that had a youth between the ages of 11 and 17 as of
December 1976. The current study used data from Wave V (1980),
when the participants were between 15 and 21 years old, and Wave
VI (1983), when the participants were between the ages of 18 and
24. The Wave VI analysis focused on men who were married or
cohabiting with a partner of the opposite sex and who completed a
measure of domestic violence (n=176). Men's violence toward their
female partners was measured with the eight physical aggression
items from the Straus Conflict Tactics Scales. Men who had
engaged in one or more of these behaviors in the year prior to
assessment were classified as domestically violent. The men's
general deviance (other than acts of domestic violence) was
measured by participants' responses to 44 items at Wave VI and 40
items at Wave V that described illegal or socially proscribed
behavior. Of the 176 married or cohabiting men in the Wave VI
sample, 66 (37.5 percent) reported engaging in 1 or more acts
of physical violence against a female partner in the year prior
to assessment. At Wave V, 75 percent of the total sample reported
committing one or more deviant acts; and at Wave VI, 66 percent
of the total sample reported engaging in one or more deviant
acts. At Wave VI, 76 percent of domestically violent men reported
engaging in one or more concurrent deviant acts. Chi-square
analyses found that a greater proportion of domestically violent
men engaged in other deviant behavior than men who were not
domestically violent. At the Wave V assessment, 89 percent of
domestically violent men reported engaging in one or more deviant
acts at the Wave V assessment. Chi-square analyses indicated that
domestic violence at Wave VI was predicted by deviant behavior at
Wave V. In order to determine whether the relationship between
domestic violence and other deviant behavior would hold under
more stringent definitions of deviance, the researchers
reanalyzed the data with increasingly conservative
operationalizations of deviance, i.e., two or more deviant acts
in the past year and three or more deviant acts in the past year.
The results did not change. Domestic violence and other deviant
behavior were associated both concurrently and prospectively
regardless of the operationalization of deviance used. These findings are consistent with a general deviance explanation of domestic violence and suggest a potentially fruitful area of
future study. The authors' plans for future research in this area
are described, and implications of the current findings are drawn
for practitioners. 2 exhibits and 23 references
Date Published: January 1, 2004