Street Youth, Violence, and Hirschi’s Redefinition of Self-Control

ABSTRACTThe research examines Hirschi’s redefinition of self-control and its link to violence. Utilizing a sample of 287 homeless street youth the paper explores the criminogenic impacts of three different operationalizations of self-control. It investigates the direct effects of bonding self-control, attitudinal self-control, and decisional self-control on violence and assesses the indirect relationships that bonding self-control and attitudinal self-control have with violence through their associations with decisional self-control. Results indicate all three measures of self-control contribute to the understanding of intentions to engage in violence. Further, evidence reveals that both bonding self-control and attitudinal self-control have indirect links to offending through their impact on decisional self-control. Findings are discussed and suggestions for future research offered. AcknowledgementsSpecial thanks to Ashley DePaola for her assistance. The author would also like to express appreciation to the referees and editor for their helpful comments and guidance in improving the article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Exploratory analysis was undertaken examining alternative coding strategies of the dependent variable (e.g., logging the dependent variable; taking the square root of the dependent variable; recoding the most extreme of the outliers in the dependent variable [those at or above the 90th percentile in the distribution] to the 90th percentile). The results of this process indicated that these procedures produced substantively similar results but showed decreased model fits in each case when compared to the original coding of the dependent variable. Therefore, the decision was made to use the current coding of the dependent variable.2 Hirschi’s own methodological tactic of dichotomizing each indicator of the social bond and then summing the items was also explored. In each case responses of usually/always for the family measures, agree and strongly agree for school, and disagree/strongly disagree for belief were coded as 1 with other categories coded 0. The alpha determining the reliability for this dichotomized additive scale was .72. Throughout the analyses the Likert version of the variable performed better and was ultimately chosen as the preferred measure.3 This variable might be interpreted to be a behavioral measure of self-control. Additional analysis showed that removing this variable from the equations did increase the relationships between the attitudinal self-control measure and violence but did not impact the overall substantive results.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada [435-2017-0188].Notes on contributorsStephen W. BaronStephen W. Baron is a professor in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University. His research focuses primarily on homeless street youth and crime and substance abuse. He is concerned with how various criminological theories can be used to help us understand these forms of behavior among the homeless street youth population. His work on these types of issues has appeared in a variety of academic journals, including Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, Deviant Behavior, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Journal of Crime and Justice and Crime and Delinquency.