Strain Theories Part II Learning Theories

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Strain Theories Part IILearning Theories

1. Agnews General Strain Theory
2. Sutherlands Differential Association Theory
3. Akerss Differential Reinforcement Theory

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Merton

• Anomie is tied to economic status

Early strain theory focused on relationship
between low social class status and crime
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Agnew (1992) and GST

• General strain theory (GST)
• In the theory, he postulated that strain need not
  be specifically tied to economic status because
  it was actually a psychological reaction to any
  perceived negative aspects of one's social
  environment

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GST

• Hypothetically, individuals from all social
  classes could engage in criminal behavior because
  they could all experience negative emotions
  arising from strain
• This modification of Mertons theory made GST
  powerful because it could explain all types of
  offending

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Robert Agnews General Strain Theory (1992)

• Anger has a significant impact on all measures of
  crime and deviance

ANGER
Criminal Behavior
Strain
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What are Strains?

• Strains refer to events or conditions that are
  disliked by most individuals

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Strains

• Objective
• Subjective

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Objective or Subjective?

• Objective vs subjective strains
• I lost the paper that I was working on my
  computer. I was almost done
• I got into a huge fight with my best friend and
  completely terminated our relationship
• I hate when my Dad is drunkand he is drinking
  every day

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Objective Strains

• Some events and conditions are disliked by most
  people (being physically assaulted or being
  deprived of food/shelter)
• Domestic violence

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Subjective Strains

• Subjective evaluation of objective strains
• Influenced by a range of factors, including
  peoples personality traits, goals and values,
  and prior experiences
• Example Death of a spouse vs death of a
  spouse-abuser

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Three major types of strain

• Failure to achieve positively valued goals
• Loss of positive stimuli
• Presentation of negative stimuli

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Failure to achieve positively valued goals

• Gap between expectations and actual achievements
  (not always long-term)

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Loss of positive stimuli

• Experiencing the stressful impact felt before and
  after moving
• Parental Divorce
• Death of a relative/close friend
• Break Up
• Lost privilege to use a family car/credit card
  

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Presentation of negative stimuli

• Peer pressure
• Physical /emotional abuse)
• Stress, bullying and depression ranked one, two
  and three respectively in a list of incidents as
  reported by elementary, middle and high school
  students.

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As reported by students enrolled in schools using
AnComms Talk About It anonymous online
reporting service. The annual AnComm Talk About
It Report sample includes more than 70,000
students enrolled in 52 schools across 12 states.
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GST

• While GST posited that each type of strain
  ultimately lead to deviance for slightly
  different reasons, all three types were thought
  to increase the likelihood that an individual
  would experience negative emotions in proportion
  to the magnitude, duration, and recency of the
  stress

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Coping with strain through crime

• Why are some people more likely than other to
  cope with strains through crime?
• Bad temper
• Low self-control
• Previous delinquent behavior
• Delinquent friends
• If the initial goals are high and they have few
  alternative goals to fall back on, then the
  person may be more prone to committing delinquent
  acts

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Links Between Strain and Crime

• Strain Anger
• Anger was found to incite a person to action, and
  create a desire for revenge
• Crime allows individuals to obtain revenge
  against those who have wronged them
• Crime may allow individuals to alleviate their
  negative emotions

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Agnews Theory
Factors affecting disposition to delinquency
Criminal Behavior
ANGER
Strain
Constraints to delinquent behavior
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Coping Strategies Other Than Crime

• Crime is not the only way that people will
  respond to strain
• There are three different types of coping
  strategies that enable the individual to deal
  with the strain in their life through legitimate
  means
• Cognitive
• Emotional
• Behavioral

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Cognitive coping strategies

• Enable the individual to rationalize the
  stressors in three ways (Agnew, 1992)
• Minimize the importance of the strain by placing
  less importance on a particular goal
• Maximizing the positive while minimizing the
  negative outcomes of an event. This is an attempt
  to ignore the fact that there has been a negative
  event
• Accept the outcomes of the negative outcomes as
  fair

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Behavioral coping strategies

• Individuals may actively seek out positive
  stimuli (Social supports from friends and
  relatives)
• Try to escape negative stimuli. In addition,
  individuals may actively seek out revenge in a
  non-delinquent manner (Agnew, 199269)

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Emotional coping strategies

• Relaxation methods
• Sport
• Meditation

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GST and gender differences in crime

• The levels and types of strain could be different
  for girls and for boys
• Boys and girls may have different responses to
  the same strain
• Gender variation in conditioning effects (gender
  differences in dealing/coping with strain)

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The levels and types of strain

• Boys are more likely than are girls to experience
  strain because of negative peer relations that
  are marked by conflict, competition, jealousy,
  and imbalance
• Girls are especially susceptible to strain caused
  by problems in forming and maintaining positive
  relationships with family and friends

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Different responses to the same strain

• Consistent with gender socialization, when facing
  stressors, males would be more likely to behave
  aggressively
• Females would be more likely to engage in more
  passive and self-destructive forms of
  delinquency, such as running away form home,
  alcohol use, etc.

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Sex differences in emotional response
Female Male
More likely to respond with depression and anger More likely to respond with anger
Anger is accompanied by fear, guilt, and shame Anger is followed by moral outrage
More likely to blame themselves and worry about the affects of their anger Quick to blame others and are less concerned about hurting others
Depression and guilt may lead to self-destructive behaviors (i.e. eating disorders) Moral outrage may lead to property and violent crime
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Sex differences in coping strategies

• Females employ escape and avoidance methods to
  relieve the strain
• Females have stronger relational ties that might
  help to reduce strain (social support)
• Males are lower in social control, and they
  socialize in large, hierarchical peer groups
  where they need to maintain their status
• Therefore, males are more likely to respond to
  strain with crime (Agnew 1997).

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Empirical support

• Numerous tests of GST had also examined the
  relationship between strain and negative emotion,
  yielding mixed results
• Several studies had found strain-induced anger to
  be the primary negative emotion to exert a
  significant effect on deviance (Broidy, 2001 and
  Piquero and Sealock, 2000).

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Empirical support

• Others had found that the significant mediating
  impact of anger was limited to situations of
  violence (Aseltine et al., 2000, Capowich et al.,
  2001, Mazerolle et al., 2000, Mazerolle and
  Piquero, 1998 and Piquero and Sealock, 2000), and
  even that anger actually had an indirect effect
  on crime and strain a direct effect (Mazerolle et
  al., 2000).

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Policy Recommendations

• Agnew proposed several different programs to
  reduce delinquency which have shown success after
  being implemented

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Policy Recommendations

• Family-based programs are designed to teach the
  members how to solve problems in a constructive
  manner, and parents are taught how to effectively
  discipline their children (Agnew, 1995)
• This will reduce the amount of negative emotions
  that result from conflict in the family and will
  decrease the amount of strain in the home

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Policy Recommendations

• School-based programs seek to improve relations
  in and between schools
• Peer based programs seek to reduce the amount of
  strain that an adolescent feels as a result of
  relationships with peers
• Relationships with peers can be negative when the
  peers are delinquent or when they are physically
  or verbally abusive toward other peers

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Critiques

• There is not much data to support or refute it
• Objective/subjective strain
• Measurement of strain