Title: Girls' Peer and Partner Relations: Links to Antisocial Behavior
1- Girls' Peer and Partner Relations Links to
Antisocial Behavior
2Same and Opposite-Gender Relationships among
Court-Involved Girls A Qualitative Perspective
- Shari Miller-Johnson, Donna-Marie Winn, Rebecca
Schaffer, Sherri Lawson Clark - With a special thanks to the girls who gave us a
glimpse into their lives
3(No Transcript)
4Juvenile Females as a Percentage of all Juvenile
Index Crime Arrests (FBI)
5PEERS WHAT DOES THE LITERATURE TELL US?
- Peer affiliations1 is a lonely number
- Selection birds of a feather flock together
- Socialization deviancy training
6AND THE GIRLS?
- Early work lone wolves more recent work -
discounted - Gendered dynamic
- Girls delinquency occurs with males
- bad boyfriend hypothesis
- Girls as victims
7QUALITATIVE APPROACH
- Particularly useful with understudied population
- Data allow for the emergence of the unexpected
- Exploratory study, with particular interests in
unpacking - Nature of girlfriends/friend-girls
- Opposite-gender relationships
- Are girls in a victim frame of mind?
8OUR GIRLS
- Adjudicated
- Mid-size, Southeastern city
- Inner-city neighborhoods plagued with persistent
poverty, underemployment, substance abuse, and
violence - Prime location for drug trafficking on the
eastern seaboard - 8 randomly selected females
- Ages 14-17 7 African-American, 1
European-American - 2 semi-structured interviews
- Audio-recorded, transcribed
- 1-2 hours each interview home-based
9ANALYSIS
- Iterative process among research team
- Began with initial questions developed 1st
interview - Allowed for emergence of new themes
- Used this information to add new questions to the
2nd interview - Developed matrices and culled major themes
- Content analysis
- Cross case identified major themes across all of
the girls - Within-case analysis examined domains within
each girl
10WHAT ARE THEIR AFFILIATIONSSAME GENDER
- I used to hang around females, I dont hang
around females no more, I hang around males . . .
I act like them, more like them than being like
females . . . females gossip about all, be that
type to go around gossiping, males dont. - Female friendships either none or when younger
few high quality female friends - Those with female friends some good qualities
11WHAT ARE THEIR AFFILIATIONSSOCIAL AGGRESSION
- Girls act like they are better than you or
better than someone else that you knew all the
time. Its like so retardedTheyll just like
spread rumors . . like shes such a slut. - Associated with
- Isolation from other females
- Affiliations with males
12WHAT ARE THEIR AFFILIATIONS?BOYFRIENDS
- All of them except (1 had been in trouble).
They havent told me about it but I know. Some
told about it, I havent been around when they
have got in trouble. My number one boyfriend he
was the biggest trouble maker..(he) was in a
gang. At the time I might have been 12, (he) was
17 or 18 the time. - Boys going to cheat regardless. If not cheat,
they going to sleep with somebody. Cuz aint
that two different things, sleeping and
cheating?...Cuz some boy might say I never
cheated on you but I have slept with other
girlsBut we think they still cheating. - Negative views towards the males
- Virtually all were delinquent, older
- Girls typically not involved in their delinquency
13WHAT ARE THEIR AFFILIATIONS?OPPOSITE GENDER
- The boys, they would be in gangs, not the girls,
and I used to hang out with my friends and all
the gang. We used to sit out there and smoke weed
and stuff and thats all we would do. And we
would stay out late. - They was really there to help me. I admire them
and I really love them, I stay with them or if I
needed something to eat they would give it to me,
feed me. We had great conversations, we would
talk about things that was very important to us.
And its funny that a male can actually do that
with a female but sometimes you need the opposite
sex and they actually understand. - Large, diffuse groups of older, delinquent males
with peripheral younger females - For some girls especially the runners
groups provided basic necessities as well as a
sense of belonging
14CONTEXT
- This area over here is called the South Side and
people in the environment over here, I just feel
like they are my family, but anywhere else I
wouldnt feel comfortable because you know I
dont know who they are, (mostly) guys - they are
my brothers. - Cuz at the time when I was fighting a female, it
was an older girllike 20 or 21 and my mama
called my sister and told her look, this older
girl is messing with XX and I want you to do this
and I want you to do that and its just like my
mom and a whole lot of other people, my uncles
and everybody just approached the scene....I
think my mama is still attracted about that kind
of stuff. - Neighborhood talked about positively
- Kin often the gatekeeper and sometimes
supportive of delinquent behaviors
15DISTRUST
- I cant trust nobodyFriends or not friendsI
mean you cant trust people, like I say they do
something one time, you cant trust them no
more. - I just dont trust them (girls) because if you
tell them something everybody will know, they
stay in too much drama for me to trust them with
anything of mine, my money or my business. - General assumption that people/girls are
untrustworthy - Evidence of having been hurt previously by
someone (either romantic or non-romantic)
16SUMMARY
- Expected but still fills out
- Lots of bad boyfriends
- Poor quality same-gender relations
- Context neighborhood and kin
- Giordano encapsulation hypothesis
17SUMMARY (contd)
- Emergent themes
- Role of non-boyfriend male affiliations needs
based, affiliation and belonging - Role of social aggression deters same-gender
friendships - Distrust particularly of females
18NEXT STEPS
- Further exploration of themes
- More detailed analyses of these themes with girls
- Unpack agency theme girls present as having a
lot of agency and choice - Explore boys data
- Preliminary ideas intervention
- Generalized and situation specific distrust
- Social aggression
- Influence of non-romantic cross-gender
relationships