Drunk Driving and the Prediction of Analogous Behavior: A Longitudinal Test of Social Learning and Self-Control Theories

Abstract

Drunk driving assumed near pandemic proportions in the 1980s, and state legislatures rushed to control it throughout the 1990s—largely with increased surveillance, apprehension, and punishment, key elements in a deterrence model. Early in the twenty-first century, researchers and policy makers suggested that deterrence models poorly served us in the control of drunk drivers. Policy makers needed better insights into the social psychology of chronic drunk drivers. In their general theory of crime, Gottfredson and Hirschi describe the propensity of low self-control persons to exhibit a higher propensity for crime and analogous behavior relative to persons with higher levels of self-control. Akers's social learning theory emphasizes the various mechanisms by which the motives, orientations, and methods of crime and delinquency are learned and reinforced. We used data collected as part of an assessment of a municipal court drug-treatment program to explore the ability of variables taken from both theories to predict status as an alcoholic, self-reported misconduct, and subsequent criminal conduct. We followed the program's 110 drunk drivers for at least six months after sentencing. We found that with respect to status as an alcoholic and reconviction status, age (i.e., being older) and level of self-reported misbehavior (i.e., higher levels of self-reported criminal activity) are the most crucial factors. In terms of the theoretical variables, only differential associations play a significant role in the analyses; further, this role appears to be indirect, through the level of self-reported misbehavior.

Keywords:

• theory-testing
• drunk driving
• offenders

Paper presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology in Toronto, Canada. This work was supported in part under award # 96-IJ-CX-0022 from the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice. The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments and observations about an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹It can be argued that a thorough test of self-control theory would separate out the impact of parental management and self-control level (see, e.g., Gibbs & Giever, 1995; Gibbs, Giever, & Higgins, 2003; Gibbs, Giever, & Martin, 1998). According to this logic, one would first examine the links between parental management and self-control, and subsequently explore the ties between only self-control and the misconduct. We elected to include measures of both self-control constructs in the analysis, along with measures from four social learning variables, without specifying the sequential ordering in either theory.

²In October of 1997, roughly eight months into the research project, the chief judge of the Las Cruces Municipal Court resigned. His appointed replacement would not allow the researchers to continue the practice of assigning eligible DWI offenders to either the treatment or control groups. The current study includes only those individuals whose cases the chief judge and his staff reviewed and whom they diagnosed as alcoholic or not. We were able to check subsequent conviction records for those individuals included in our study at that date. For more on this change see Winfree and Giever (2000) or Breckenridge, Winfree, Maupin, and Clason (2000).

³Other studies have used this technique of measuring differential reinforcements with considerable predictive validity (Winfree & Griffiths, 1983; Winfree, Sellers, & Clason, 1993).

⁴The debate about the dimensional qualities of self-control is far from resolved (cf., Grasmick et al., 1993; Arneklev, Cochran, & Gainey, 1998; DeLisi et al., 2003; Longshore, Stein, & Turner, 1998; Longshore et al., 1996; Turner & Piquero, 2002; Wood, Pfefferbaum, & Arneklev, 1993). Two of the authors of this work have taken opposing positions; one endorses self-control's treatment as a single measure (Gibbs & Giever, 1995; Gibbs, Giever, & Higgins, 2003; Gibbs, Giever, & Martin, 1998), and the other views self-control as a far more multidimensional construct (Winfree, Fornango, & Esbensen, 2004; Winfree, Taylor, He, & Esbensen, 2005). We based the current scale on the single dimension perspective as we constructed the questionnaire in 1996. Hence, it is possible that we would achieve different results by the use of multiple measures of self-control.

⁵One of the major limitations of this study is the homogeneity of the participants. That is, all of our subjects were DWI arrestees. A more complete test of either self-control or social learning theory would explore a general population and explore differences between those arrested for DWI and those not arrested, as well as differences between those who reported it and did not report it, irrespective of arrest status. Put another way, we are only looking at within group variance. We would not expect to find large differences between the “different groups” since by definition they are similar. We suspect that the lack of statistically significant findings in this study might be partially attributable to this fact.