Pro-violence Definitions and Violent Behavior among College Students in USA and Canada

• In Event: Poster Session II

Abstract

Using survey data collected between 2001 and 2006 from samples of college students enrolled in American (N = 4,162) and Canadian (N = 1,132) institutions of higher education, this analysis intends to identify some of the factors more likely to influence one’s involvement in violent behavior. Overall, compared to their Canadian counterparts, US students did not acknowledge a significantly different level of involvement in violent acts, despite the fact that they were more likely to be physically victimized by their parents, that they received more frequently family advice supporting retaliatory violence, and that they had more often pro-violence definitions. Additionally, inter-group comparisons indicate that when controlling for the selected predictors, American female students were significantly less likely than Canadian female students to acknowledge violent offending, while no inter-country differences in violent behavior were found among males. Nonetheless, in both groups differentiated by the respondent’s gender, those who committed violent acts before and after they were 15 years old, have been childhood victims of parental and non-parental physical abuse, witnessed inter-parental violence, have been encouraged by family members to respond with violence to attacks and insults, had pro-violence definitions, and they were younger than 25 years old.

Authors

• Viviana Andreescu, University of Louisville

• Ruben Pavlov, University of Louisville