1. Multidimensionality of Measures of Youth Attitudes Toward Violence in
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research on Conflcit and Violence
Multidimensionality of Measures of Youth Attitudes Toward Violence in
Cross-National Studies: Analyses of Five European Countries
Eva Groß and Berit Haußmann
5. Results: The „Eastern Effect“
3. Data and Methods
1. Introduction
Studies centring around attitude measures across different cultural contexts often ignore the question of comparable interpretability of the measured dependent latent construct (e.g., Zhao/Cao 2010). This turned out to be an essential problem in our comparative study of youth attitudes toward violence across five different European nations.
Data was collected by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony (KFN) in Krakov (N=1519), Volgograd (N=1747), Ljubljana (N=1934), Pilsen (N=1270) and Hamburg (N=3435) in 1998, 1999 and 2000 via surveys in 9th grade school classes (representative of youths in the cities, random, stratified by school types, see Wetzels/Mecklenburg/Enzmann/Pfeiffer 2001).
Using confirmatory factor analysis in multi-group comparisons, based on EFA and applying the criteria of partial measurement invariance by Steenkamp/Baumgartner (1998), we extracted a reduced measurement instrument for youth attitudes toward violence which can be used to measure, compare and interpret the attitudes across the five nations under consideration.
CFI=0.955; RMSEA=0.079; SRMR=0.035
Reasoning of IAT seems coherent with respect to the instrumental motive in our data but the hedonistic facet of Eastern effect opens up an unexpected line of inquiry.
Eastern effect remains stable even after additionally controlling for deprivation, early (before the age of 12) child rearing practices in the family, current (within the last 12 months) norm orientation of parents, current family climate, exposure to delinquent peer groups, age and education.
4. Results: The Reduced Instrument
6. Conclusion and Discussion
Eastern effect affirms the inferences drawn from factor analysis: The opposite effects on the two motives mean that the instrument may on no account be treated and interpreted as one-dimensional construct across contexts.
Additional analyses reveal that the mechanisms that lead to the Eastern effect are complex: family seems to play an indirect part in the relationship between Eastern Europe and instrumental/utilitarian motivation for violence.
Precise mechanisms need more theorizing/empirical assessment, e.g., to what extent does economic dominance affect motives for youth violence indirectly via socialisation provided by non-economic institutions or directly via cultural orientations?
Literature:
Messner, S.F., Rosenfeld, R. (1994) Crime and the American Dream. Belmont, Wadsworth/ Messner, S.F., Thome, H., Rosenfeld, R. (2008) Institutions, Anomie and Violent Crime: Clarifying and Elaborating IAT. IJCV 2(2): /Bernburg, J.G. (2002). Anomie, Social Change and Crime: A Theoretical Examination of IAT. British Journal of Criminology 42: /Steenkamp, J., Baumgartner, H. (1998). Assessing Measurement Invariance in Cross-National Consumer Research. Journal of Consumer Research 25(1): /Wetzels, P. et al. (2001). Jugend und Gewalt – Eine repräsentative Dunkelfeldanalyse in München und in acht anderen deutschen Städten. Baden-Baden. Nomos/Zhao, R., Cao, L. (2010). Social Change and Anomie: A Cross-National Study, Social Forces 88(3):
2. General Idea/Research Problem
Based on Institutional Anomie Theory (Messner/Rosenfeld 1994, Messner/Thome/Rosenfeld 2008), applied on the Eastern European context of transformation (Bernburg 2002), we expected higher instrumental motivated approval of violence among adolescents in Eastern Europe than in Germany.
Problem: Our dependent variable, the measurement of youth attitudes toward violence, had different factor structures across the nations, thus the different cultural contexts do have an impact on the meaning of the manifest variables for the latent dimensions, the motives for violence (dimensions) could not be identified and meaningfully interpreted across nations.
X2=500.4 (53); CFI=0.972; RMSEA/SRMR=0.067/0.034
Motive 1: Hedonistic motivation for violence
Motive 2: “Mixed” instrumental/utilitarian motivation for violence, honour as compensatory substitution to monetary success offered by collectivist elements of cultural tradition.