Citation
Palmer-Boyes, Ashley & Jang, Sung Joon (2010). Gender differences in strain adaptations during emerging adulthood. Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology. San Francisco, CA.Abstract
Previous studies tend to provide empirical support for general strain theory (GST) explanations of gender differences in crime. To contribute to the literature on GST and gender, this study examines the effect of victimization as strain on negative emotions and the effect of negative emotions on deviant coping during emerging adulthood. Specifically, we focus on three relatively understudied types of victimization – child maltreatment, criminal violence, and domestic violence – and two types of negative emotions and deviant coping, inner-directed and outer-directed. We first hypothesize the effects of strain on negative emotions to be larger among women than men with the gender difference being more pronounced for inner-directed (i.e., depression) than outer-directed emotions (i.e., anger). Second, the effects of both types of negative emotions on inner-directed coping (i.e., suicidality) are hypothesized to be larger than the effects on other-directed coping (e.g., heavy drinking and violent crime) among women compared to men. To test our hypotheses, we analyze the third and fourth waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.Reference Type
Conference proceedingBook Title
Annual Meeting of the American Society of CriminologyAuthor(s)
Palmer-Boyes, AshleyJang, Sung Joon