Violence against women in video games: a prequel or sequel to rape myth acceptance?

Current research suggests a link between negative attitudes toward women and violence against women, and it also suggests that media may condition such negative attitudes. When considering the tremendous and continued growth of video game sales, and the resulting proliferation of sexual objectification and violence against women in some video games, it is lamentable that there is a dearth of research exploring the effect of such imagery on attitudes toward women. This study is the first study to use actual video game playing and control for causal order, when exploring the effect of sexual exploitation and violence against women in video games on attitudes toward women. By employing a Solomon Four-Group experimental research design, this exploratory study found that a video game depicting sexual objectification of women and violence against women resulted in statistically significant increased rape myths acceptance (rape-supportive attitudes) for male study participants but not for female participants.     

The Authority to Do Good: Publicly Responsible Behavior among Private Mortgage Lenders

Private organizations are increasingly relied on, explicitly and implicitly, to carry out public objectives. But given that profit and public motives are not always aligned, why do private firms behave in publicly responsible ways? Specifically, how do diverse regulative, economic, normative, and cultural influences combine to enable or constrain publicly responsible behavior? This analysis focuses on a specific group of private actors: mortgage lenders. Through semi‐structured interviews with private lending agents participating in a public mortgage program, this analysis investigates influences that contribute to publicly responsible behavior. From the interviews, four different publicness dispositions are identified: pecuniary (sensitive to economic and regulative constraints), traditional (sensitive to regulative and isomorphic constraints), altruistic (sensitive to isomorphic and cultural‐cognitive influences), and opportunistic (sensitive to multiple influences). Even for organizations (and their actors) operating within the same policy context and the same public program, responses to political authority likely are contingent on varying publicness dispositions.     

The gendering effects of co-authorship in criminology & criminal justice research

Historically, research from various fields has indicated that females are underrepresented in academic papers. Not only are females less likely to publish relative to males, but they are also less likely to be sole-, co-, and first-authors in journal publications. While this gender discrepancy has become smaller in recent decades, males are still disproportionately represented in academic papers. The current study reviews author characteristics of articles published in the top fifteen criminology/criminal justice journals over a forty-year period (1974–2014). Among the 11,348 articles in the study, results indicated that while female sole- and first-authorship increased throughout the study period, 26.6% of sole-authors were female while 32% were first-authors and composed 33.3% of all co-authors. Further, females were less likely to be sole- and first-authors, less likely to have co-authors, and more likely to publish with other female co-authors.     

The Need for a Stronger Definition: Recognizing Abandonment as a form of Elder Abuse Across the United States

Elder abuse is a growing public health problem in the United States and statistics show that each year, hundreds of thousands of elders are abused in some manner. This Note discusses elder abuse while focusing specifically on the occurrence of elder abandonment and how the majority of states do not recognize elder abandonment as a form of elder abuse in their statutes. Moreover, this Note proposes a model statute to be adopted by every state in an effort for elder abandonment to become more widely reported. Elder abandonment is an unfortunate phenomenon and those who contribute to elder abandonment should face criminal liability similar to those abusers who engage in elder neglect or other types of elder abuse. Furthermore, this Note emphasizes that there should be a greater focus on how caregivers can seek assistance in order to prevent elder abuse in the United States.     

Arrest and the Amplification of Deviance: Does Gang Membership Moderate the Relationship?

Although research has found that gang suppression efforts are largely ineffective, these policies have been responsible for the arrests of many gang youth. Prior research indicates that arrest is associated with deleterious consequences, but we know less about how arrest uniquely affects gang members. Using longitudinal data from a school-based sample, this study explores the effects of arrest for both gang and nongang youth. Propensity score matching and matched outcome analyses allow us to determine whether gang membership moderates the effect of arrest on later deviant outcomes. Our results indicate that the consequences of arrest are inconsistent with the goals of suppression tactics, with gang members reporting little to no change in deviant attitudes and peers and modest increases in delinquency. Meanwhile, nongang youth experience a range of consequences associated with arrest, including increased odds of gang-joining.     

An outcome evaluation of the Methodist Home for Children’s value-based therapeutic environment model

Objectives

This study presents an outcome evaluation of the Value-Based Therapeutic Environment model, a multipurpose, cognitive–behavioral treatment approach for juvenile offenders.

Methods

Using a quasi-experimental design, the impact of VBTE treatment on recidivism is assessed for 258 youths, relative to a matched subsample of 258 comparison subjects.

Results

Results indicate that VBTE treatment is an effective intervention for reducing violent recidivism but has no significant effect on property, drug, or public order offenses. Consistent with past research, offender type moderates the impact of treatment. Specifically, 72.8 % of high-risk/need youth in the comparison group had reoffended within a 16-month follow-up period, compared to only 57.5 % of high-risk/need MHC youth, yet there were no significant differences between the treatment and comparison groups among low- and medium-risk/need juveniles. Moreover, the odds of a new violent charge were 49 % lower for high-risk/need MHC youth during the 12 months following MHC-discharge. Supplementary analysis indicates that VBTE participants also showed improvements on value- and skills-based behaviors related to self-image, goal orientation, honesty, empathy, decision-making, and personal development.

Conclusions

Findings of this study suggest that the VBTE model is a promising approach for the treatment of violent behavior among high-risk youth. Implications of the findings are discussed with regard to alternative treatment approaches for juvenile offenders.

     

From uninformed to informed choices: Voters,pre-election polls and updating

Pre-election opinion poll results for U.S. presidential contests have large variation in the early parts of the primary campaigns, yet pre-election opinion polls later in the campaign are typically within several percentage points of the actual outcome of the contest in November. This paper argues this trend demonstrates that voters are beginning to poll “correctly” – that is, to ascertain their most-preferred candidate. This convergence process is consistent with boundedly rational voters making decisions with low information. We examine the process by which voters can use opinion polls to guide their candidate choice. We undertake a series of laboratory experiments where uninformed voters choose between two candidates after participating in a series of pre-election polls. We demonstrate that voters update their beliefs about candidate locations using information contained in the opinion polls. We compare two behavioral models for the updating process and find significant evidence to support a boundedly rational Bayesian updating assumption. This assumption about the updating process is key to many theoretical results which argue that voters have the potential to aggregate information via a coordination signal and for their beliefs to converge to the true state of the world. This finding also indicates that uninformed voters are able to use pre-election polls to help them make correct decisions.     

Reaching Out versus Lashing Out: Examining Gender Differences in Experiences with and Responses to Bullying in High School

The present study examines gender differences in bullying in high school. Unique contributions include comparisons of both victimization and perpetration rates across four subtypes of bullying: physical, verbal, relational, and cyber. Further, as we conceptualize bullying within the larger framework of literature on social rejection, we also address whether there are gender differences in experiencing social rejection–in the form of bullying–and responding with aggression, as opposed to asocial or prosocial behavior. The literature yields mixed findings across these three questions (i.e., gender differences in experiences with victimization and perpetration and responses to those experiences), suggesting sample variations (Archer Review of General Psychology, 8(4), 291–322, 2004; Archer & Coyne Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9, 212–230, 2005; Card, Stucky, Sawalani, & Little Child Development, 79, 1185–1229, 2008). Thus, we explored experiential differences in our sample, and hypothesized based on the tend and befriend model (Taylor et al., 2000) that girls would be more likely than boys to respond to bullying with prosocial behaviors. With regard to victimization and perpetration differences, we found that male students both experienced and perpetrated significantly more physical bullying. Boys were also significantly more likely to report experiencing verbal bullying than girls. No significant differences emerged for relational or cyber bullying. With regard to responses, social withdrawal was more common than aggressive responding, but consistent with the tend and befriend model, girls chose prosocial responses significantly more than boys, whereas boys were just as likely to choose antisocial responding as prosocial responding. These results suggest that gender should be considered in studies addressing the question of when experiences with rejection–in its many forms–results in antisocial versus prosocial behavior.     

Sanctions,Perceived Anger,and Criminal Offending

In articulating models of offender decision-making, researchers have tended to focus on either deterrence/rational choice or situational/emotional considerations. In this paper, we merge these two lines of inquiry and examine how rational choice considerations and perceived angry reactions inter-relate in predicting assaultive violence. Using data collected on a random sample of young adults, we assess three hypotheses. First, that both rational choice and perceived anger exhibit additive effects on assault. Second, that perceived anger influences how rational choice considerations are interpreted. Third, that rational choice considerations influence assault under different levels of perceived anger, and in particular, that the effect of sanction threats fall apart under high perceived anger. Future theoretical and empirical directions are outlined.