Domestic Violence and Deviant Behavior (From Violence Against Women and Family Violence: Developments in Research, Practice, and Policy, 2004, Bonnie Fisher, ed. -- See NCJ-199701)

• NCJ Number: 199713
• Author(s): William D. Norwood; Ernest N. Jouriles; Renee McDonald; Paul R. Swank
• Date Published: 2004
• Length: 10 pages
• Grant Number(s): 98-WT-VX-0005
• Sponsoring Agency: National Institute of Justice (NIJ)
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/NCJRS; NCJRS Photocopy Services
• Publication Format: Document
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Dataset may be archived by the NIJ Data Resources Program at the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data

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