Animal Abuse among High-Risk Youth: A Test of Agnew’s Theory

ABSTRACT

Concern over animal abuse among policy-makers, law enforcement officials, and the general public remains high. Although research has marked animal abuse as an indicator of a variety of deviant outcomes, fewer projects have examined the correlates of cruelty towards animals. In this study, we apply Agnew’s theory of animal abuse to explore how a wide-range of characteristics relate to deviance towards animals. In support of Agnew’s theory, results reveal that a combination of individual traits and behaviors, socialization experiences, and mechanisms of social control significantly relate to animal abuse. However, measures of strain do not appear to relate to animal abuse, providing only partial support to the theory.

Notes

¹ We examined the influence of outliers on the results by removing outliers from the analysis. The results of the model both with and without the outliers were substantively the same. Thus, we include the outliers in the analysis but use the natural logarithm to reduce the influence of the skewness on the analysis.

² Because there are only two clusters, we also tested a single-level model with robust standard errors. The results were substantively the same. Due to it being a more appropriate model for the nature of the data, we report the multi-level models in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the Center for Family and Demographic Research, Bowling Green State University, which has core funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2CHD050959).

Notes on contributors

Thomas J. Mowen

Thomas J. Mowen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Bowling Green State University. His research examines the effect of punishment on youth and family outcomes and the role of family within the process of reentry from prison. Tom’s recent work has appeared in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Journal of Quantitative Criminology.

John H. Boman IV

John H. Boman IV is an Assistant Professor at Bowling Green State University in the Department of Sociology. His research is primarily quantitative and focuses mainly on social relationships, crime, and substance use. Some of his recent work appears in Deviant Behavior, Criminology, and Crime & Delinquency.