1. A Social Learning Approach Martina Miller
Perceptions of a target’s likelihood to be violent in an adult relationship based on gender and childhood experience of parent’s physical violence
A Social Learning Approach
Martina Miller

2. Social Learning Theory (Akers 1973)
4 components
Imitation – person imitates behaviors of people they admire
Definitions - the attitudes and values people hold about the law and deviant criminal acts
Differential Associations - person learns from the attitudes, values, and behaviors of a significant person
Differential Reinforcement – balancing rewards & costs of certain behaviors

3. Variables Independent Variable’s Dependent Variable Gender of Target
Male
Female
History of Violence in Childhood
Violence
No Violence
Dependent Variable
Participants perception of the target’s likelihood to be in a violent relationship as an adult.

4. Hypotheses
Participants will perceive both male and female targets to be likely to be in a violent adult relationship if they experienced violence between their parents in childhood.
The participants will be more likely to perceive a male target to be involved in a violent adult relationship that experienced his parents being violent towards one another during childhood.
Another hypothesis is that the male target will be perceived as more likely to be in a violent relationship without a childhood of violence than a female target.

5. Method 60 Participants Convenience Sample 4 Vignettes
Male child experienced violence
Female child experienced violence
Male child did not experience violence
Female child did not experience violence
2x2 Between-subjects ANOVA

6. Manipulation Check Please answer the following questions and
please circle your answer.
Was the target male or female?
Male or Female
Did the target have a history of violence
between his or her parents in childhood?
Yes or No

7. Results Significant main effect of gender (F(1,30)=4.383, p=.046)
Significant main effect of hx of violence between parents (F(1,30)=14.617, p=.001)
There was not a significant interaction between gender and hx of violence between parents

8. ANOVA Summary Table

9. Table of Means

10. Graph of Main Effects

11. Discussion
The findings are consistent with social learning theories differential associations components. Which says a person learns from the attitudes, values, and behaviors of a significant person.
All three hypotheses were confirmed. Males were perceived as more likely to be violent than females with both violent and non-violent hx. Males and females were both perceived as likely to be in a violent relationship with a history of violence compared to a history of non-violence.
Mialon and Mialon (2006) said that males tend to become aggressive in relationships in adulthood if they experienced their parent’s physical violence in childhood.
Reasons men might become violent could be the interaction patterns of the parents, or innate personality traits (Walker and Browne 1985 )

12. Limitations
Participant's perceptions were used and they may lower ecological validity. Participant’s perceptions might not be consistent with what is really happening and therefore would not generalize to other situations.
Future research should investigate real cases of violence in childhood and adult relationships
Female participants could have only had experience with males that were violent in their life and might tend to rate males as more violent or vice versa. This could threaten the internal validity.
More research should be done with people who are actually involved in violent relationships because partner violence is very common.