Examining college students’ differential deviance: A partial test of social structure-social learning theory

ABSTRACT

College students are engaged in a variety of activities on campus, some of which are deviant and may be criminal. This research investigated 12 activities prohibited on many college campuses (for example, smoking, meeting in an unreserved room, and removing school property without permission). Negative binomial regressions were used to analyze a count of engagement in the deviant activities and logistic regressions were used to separately analyze the three most common behaviors found in the sample—non-permitted parking, alcohol consumption, and making a false excuse. The findings show moderate support for the general (using the count variable) and the specific (using the three dichotomized variables) predictability of unofficial and official sanctions as a proxy measures of Sherman’s defiance theory and the four constructs of Akers’ social learning theory. The inconsistencies among which variables were significant and which had the strongest effect are discussed, along with a mediation analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• College students
• social learning
• social structure-social learning
• deviance
• crime
• student conduct violations

Notes

1. This dimension is referred to in Akers (2009) as theoretically defined structural variables.

2. These items had the highest frequency of participation among our sample. Each of these activities is discussed in greater detail later in the article.

3. The 12 on-campus deviant activities studied include smoking, consuming or possessing alcoholic beverages, parking in prohibited areas, meeting in an unreserved room, removing school property without permission, misrepresenting their identity with someone else’s identification card, copying the work of another student, making up excuses for missing class, possessing illegal drugs, urinating or excreting in a public place, stealing a textbook, and unapproved gambling.