Gender and Deviance: A Comparison of College Students in Japan and the United States

Abstract

Although evidence abounds in American criminology that young males are more prone to deviance than females, relatively little is known about the magnitude of the gender gap in deviance across cultures. Drawing on the literature concerning “risk taking” in power-control theory and on theory and research concerning cultural variability in “uncertainty avoidance,” we offer a rationale for predicting that the gender differences in levels of deviance are less among Japanese youth than Americans. Among Japanese, the level of male deviance should be closer to that of females because “uncertainty avoidance” is a strong component of Japanese culture that affects socialization of both males and females. Analysis of identical survey data from college students in Japan and the United States provides strong support for our argument.

Research reported was supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research to the first author from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and by a grant to the second and the third authors from the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Oklahoma.

Notes

¹College undergraduate students were chosen as respondents for two reasons. First, we had easier access to them than to younger adolescents. Second, college undergraduate students, especially early in their academic years, typically are in their most deviance-prone years. We realize, of course, that people who do not attend college are excluded from our research design and might be more (or less) deviant than those who do attend college. But the inclusion of only college students was a constant across the two samples.

²The month of April was crucial to obtain students from both countries at approximately the same stages of their academic careers. While an academic year begins in late August or early September in universities in the United States, the Japanese academic year begins in April. Thus, we chose to gather data in April of 2003. We expected the vast majority of U.S. students in the Introduction to Sociology class then would be nearing the end of their freshman or sophomore year. In fact, 50 percent of the U.S. respondents were freshmen and another 30 percent were sophomores. In the Japanese university, we gathered data in courses at the onset of the sophomore year. Had we chosen freshman-level courses in Japan, the students in the Japanese sample, unlike those in the U.S. sample, would have had hardly any experience as college students at the time the data were collected. Indeed, 93 percent of the respondents in the Japanese sample were beginning sophomores.

³Japanese students must declare a major before their admission to a university. In essence, there is no equivalent to an Introduction to Sociology (or any other subject) course taken by a large number of students outside their major.

⁴Minority group status was another issue we had to confront. Race/ethnicity is included, at least as a control, in tests of deviance theories in the United States. We knew in advance, however, that this would be problematic in our research because of the racial and ethnic homogeneity of Japan. Had we included a variable for race/ethnicity that identified minority group status, that variable would have been collinear with the dummy variable for Japan. Consequently, our plan was to use only the questionnaires completed by those who were self-identified dominant group members.

⁵The gender composition of universities in Japan and the United States means that the proportion of males in the Japanese sample will be higher. In the American university only half (51 percent) of all students were male, a figure typical of state universities in the United States. In contrast, Japanese national universities are overwhelmingly male. According to figures from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (Statistics Bureau 2003), 66 percent of all students enrolled in all national universities are males. In the particular Japanese university from which we gathered data, 71 percent of all students enrolled were males. Our two samples reflect these distributions.

∗Response options: 1 = never; 2 = rarely; 3 = sometimes; 4 = often; 5 = almost always.

∗∗Eigenvalues from principle component analysis: 3.56, 1.33, 1.14, .90, .80, .78, .67, .57, .49, .46, .33.

∗One-tailed test for unequal variances.