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Abstract
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VioLit summary:
OBJECTIVE:
The objective of this study by Gillis and Hagan was to examine levels of support given by juveniles to family, friends and strangers involved in conflict situations.
METHODOLOGY:
The authors employed a quasi-experimental cross-sectional design with a stratified random sample of 835 students from four secondary schools in Toronto, Canada. The schools served four areas that differed in socioeconomic levels: one served a primarily upper-middle-class area, one was in a middle-class area, one school was located in a lower-middle-class part of the city and the fourth served mainly lower-class students. Student names were selected from school board lists of students, with a random sample being drawn and stratified according to type of residence - multi-family apartments or single-family houses. The overall participation rate was 83.5%. Subjects participated in the study after school, completing their own questionnaires as an investigator read the questions aloud to increase reading comprehension and reliability of responses. The questionnaires contained nine hypothetical situations examining the juveniles' levels of support for family, friends and strangers, measured as their willingness to come to the aid of victims in different conflict situations. Analysis included correlations and regressions.
FINDINGS/DISCUSSION:
The authors found that subjects were more willing to intervene when family and friends were the victims, and when the situation occurred close to home. Subjects were less likely to become involved in a property crime than in a crime of violence. Delinquency of respondent was found to be negatively correlated with willingness to intervene in situations occurring downtown (-0.16), in one's neighborhood (-0.16), or near one's home (-0.11), indicating that delinquents were less likely to intervene in conflicts occurring further away from their homes. Whilst delinquents were less willing to intervene near home than were nondelinquents, delinquents reported that they were more likely to help friends (0.25) and family (0.26) than they were strangers (-0.16). The authors concluded that these results show that delinquents were more loyal than nondelinquents to those socially proximate individuals in their lives, but that delinquents were willing to give only weak wider support. The support given by delinquents was thought to be both more intense and more focused than that given by nondelinquents. Turning to possible effects of gender, the authors found no significant influence of gender upon willingness to intervene in distant locations, but they found that males were more likely than females to lend direct assistance when offenses occurred near their homes, when offenses involved strangers or when friends and family were victimized. Socioeconomic status was found to be negatively correlated with willingness to intervene on behalf of friends or family near home, with middle-class subjects being less willing to intervene directly than were lower-class respondents. To examine whether males and females differed in the form of intervention rather than just the presence of intervention, the authors condensed the willingness to intervene into a dichotomous variable. Gender then became a poor predictor of intervention, with the only significant finding being that females were slightly more inclined than were males to intervene in property crimes. Further analysis with this dichotomous variable showed that delinquency greatly increased in strength as a negative predictor of willingness of intervene, and changed from a positive to a negative predictor of intervention with family and friends. The authors concluded that, whilst males and females were equally inclined to intervene, males were more likely to intervene directly, whilst females would approach the situation indirectly and enlist the help of others. Turning to the extent of delinquency in friendship networks, the authors found that their results were consistent with the theory of differential association, with a strong positive correlation between delinquency and association with delinquents (0.50). Having friends with police contact was a stronger predictor of intervention with both family or friends and with strangers than was delinquency.
AUTHORS' RECOMMENDATIONS:
The authors suggested that their results should not be generalized without further research on delinquent populations, including research on the issue of direction of causality.
EVALUATION:
The authors present an interesting discussion of the willingness of juveniles of help others in conflict situations. Despite a good sample size and representative nature of the sample, the very brief nature of the questionnaire suggests that the variables might not have truly measured what they were designed to. A more thorough and clear discussion of the measures and of the findings would have been helpful, as would have a more detailed examination of the implications of the findings. Overall, the study should be considered as a brief, preliminary step in the examination of the role of delinquency in one's willingness to help victims of crime. (CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado)
KW - Foreign Countries
KW - Canada
KW - Social Support
KW - Delinquency Intervention
KW - Conflict Resolution
KW - Family Conflict
KW - Family Relations
KW - Peer Relations
KW - Peer Conflict
KW - Violence Intervention
KW - Victimization Intervention
KW - Crime Intervention
KW - Violence Intervention |