Culture as Values or Culture in Action? Street Codes and Student Violent Offending

ABSTRACT

The authors draw on two competing cultural perspectives—culture as values and culture in action—to examine the relationship between street codes and the propensity to violently victimize others. Specifically, they explore whether individual-level and school-level street codes, net of one another, are related to 3 types of violence: assault, robbery, and sexual battery. In addition, they consider whether these effects vary according to 3 contextual characteristics: (a) the location of the offending—in school versus out of school, (b) school-level economic disadvantage, and (c) school efficacy. Three-level ordinal logistic regression models are estimated using four waves of survey data from over 3,000 students nested within 103 schools. Results provide evidence that individual-level street codes are related to violent offending in a manner that is, largely speaking, not tied to context. However, there is some evidence that the effects of school-level street codes on offending differ between outside of school and in school settings and are conditioned by levels of school disadvantage and efficacy. Overall, some support is offered for both the culture-as-values and culture-in-action perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• culture
• schools
• street codes
• violence

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Rural Substance Abuse and Violence Project under grant number DA 11317.

Notes

1. Serious violent offenses include rape, sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault.

2. Hence, the random intercept from the level 1 equation reflects, for a given violent crime item, the offending propensity for individual i when wave = 0, in other words at the midpoint or average time point observed.

3. Factor analysis was used to confirm that the eight measures used in this index were tapping the same construct. All items loaded on a single factor that accounted for 79% of the variance.

4. In unconditional models the intraclass correlations at the school level are .037, .060, and .055 for the at-school assault, robbery, and sexual assault measures, respectively. For the not-at-school violent offending items, the corresponding intraclass correlations are .057, .043, and .052.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Rural Substance Abuse and Violence Project under grant number DA 11317.