Aggrieved Entitlement in the Ivory Tower: Quantitative and Qualitative Results From a Large-Scale Campus Survey

• In Event: School Safety and Higher Education

Abstract

The extant social scientific literature identifies a number of key risk factors associated with sexual assault and other crimes on the college campus. However, one additional determinant that has thus far been overlooked is what sociologist Michael Kimmel refers to as aggrieved entitlement, which in his words, is “a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them.” Using some of the results of the Campus Quality of Life Survey (CQLS) administered at a large college in a South Atlantic Region of the United States, the main objective of this paper to help fill a major research gap by presenting data showing that aggrieved entitlement is a correlate that warrants more attention in future empirical and theoretical work on campus crime.

Authors

• Kathryn Burnham, West Virginia University

• Walter DeKeseredy, West Virginia University

• Robert Nicewarner, West Virginia University

• James Nolan, West Virginia University

• Amanda K. Hall-Sanchez, Fairmont State University