Attitudes Towards Deviance: Sexual and Non-Sexual Violent Attitudes Across Blacks and Whites

• In Event: Scale Development, Validation, and Invariance Testing

Abstract

The Code of the Street (Anderson, 1999) has primarily been tested using a scale developed by Stewart, Schreck, and Simons (2006). This scale has been shown to perform similarly across race, ethnicity, and gender through a principal component analysis (Taylor, Esbenson, Brick, Freng, 2010). Recently, other researchers have begun to develop other items in an attempt to expand the “traditional” Code of the Street scale (McNeeley & Wilcox, 2015; Nowacki, 2012). Using data from Wave 5 of the National Youth Survey, this study aims to create an “Attitudes Towards Deviance” scale with an emphasis on sexual and non-sexual violent items as well as performing a confirmatory factor analysis to ensure that the items are loading properly. This scale will include items from Nowacki’s (2012) Code of the Street scale along with items that tap into attitudes toward sexual assault. The sample consists of 1725 individuals (918 males and 807 females). The sample also break down to being 78.9% White and 15.1% Black. The secondary purpose of this study looks to perform a invariance test to determine if this scale performs similarly across Whites and Blacks. Insights and implications into potentially expanding the “traditional” Code of the Street scale are discussed.

Author

• Victor Javier Mora, Arizona State University