Abstract
This study presents evidence on the cross-cultural generalizability of differential association/social learning theory by testing whether the causal processes of learning attitudes toward deviance, posited by the theory, are equally applicable, and the causal links, specified by the theory, are equally strong in two diverse cultures—the USA and Japan. Drawing on the literature concerning cultural variability in individualism-collectivism, we predicted that the effects of peer reactions to deviance and peer deviance on a person’s attitudes toward deviance should be stronger in Japan than in the USA, and that the mediating effect of a person’s attitudes on the relationship of peer reactions and peer deviance to a person’s deviance should be weaker among Japanese than among Americans. Analyses of comparable survey data from college students in the USA (N = 625) and Japan (N = 591) provide generally supportive, but somewhat mixed, evidence regarding our predictions. In both countries, peer reactions to deviance predicted student attitudes toward deviance more strongly than did peer deviance. Peer deviance strongly predicted student deviance, while peer reactions to deviance predicted less strongly, and the effects were mediated by student attitudes in both countries. Contrary to the hypotheses, peer reactions and peer deviance did not predict student attitudes more strongly in Japan than in the USA. Also, peer deviance predicted student deviance more strongly in the USA than in Japan. In agreement with the expectations, the relation between student attitudes and student deviance was stronger in the USA than in Japan.
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Notes
Scholars argued that, along with modern capitalism and participation in the global economy, Japanese society and Japanese people have become more individualistic and will continue to move in this direction (e.g., Hashimoto and Traphagan 2008; Iwao 1993; Kerbo and McKinstry 1997). While this might be true and might be the long-term trend in Japan, our own data revealed a lower score among the Japanese students than among the Americans on our measure of individualistic value orientation. The difference was not only significant (p < .001) but also substantial (beta = .532) with controls for gender, age, two-adult home, and parent education.
We must emphasize that the present research is not intended as a test of the full model of social learning theory. Rather, it is concentrated on the relationships among the perceived reactions and behavior of a person’s primary groups (i.e., peers) and the person’s attitudes and behavior, without positing that peer reactions and peer behavior are the only or the main sources of group influence.
College undergraduate students were chosen as students for two reasons. First, we had easier access to them than to younger adolescents. Second, college undergraduate students, especially early in their academic years, typically are in their deviance-prone years and, in addition, the questions asked referred retrospectively to their high school days. We realize, of course, that people who did not attend college were excluded from our research design and might be more (or less) deviant than those who did attend college. But the inclusion of only college students applied to both samples.
Japanese students must declare a major before their admission to a university. Unlike universities in the USA, there is no equivalent in Japan to general education courses taken by such a large number of students outside their major.
Some might question about the equivalence of self-report data in the two countries because self-disclosure in Japan, relative to the USA, is usually (and often exaggeratedly) considered to be an inappropriate behavior (Gudykunst and Nishida 1994). However, we made every effort to overcome the problem by informing the Japanese students that the name of the university would never be revealed and that there was no right or wrong answer to any of the questions.
We had to address the wide discrepancy between Japanese national and American state universities in racial and ethnic diversity, a discrepancy so wide that “minority group” status could not be a variable in our analyses. Race/ethnicity is included as a control in tests of deviance theories in the USA. We knew in advance, however, that this would be problematic in our research because of the racial and ethnic homogeneity of Japan. Whereas 77% of the US population is white (U.S. Census 2016b), typical estimates are that 98% in the Japanese population is racially and ethnically Japanese (Statistics Bureau 2017; see also Sugimoto 2003). Consequently, our plan was to use only the questionnaires completed by Caucasian students in the USA, excluding those who self-identified themselves as minority group members. Likewise, we would omit from the analyses the few Japanese students who identified themselves as “non-Japanese.”
In fact, 98% of the students in the Japanese sample were 20 years old or younger and the comparable figure in the US sample was 80%.
A large number of missing cases in the Japanese sample probably can be attributed to their lack of experience in answering a long list of survey questions and the absence of extra credits that could be earned in exchange for their participation in the survey.
The gender composition of universities was another issue to be addressed. In the American university only about half (46%) of all students were male, a figure typical of state universities in the USA. In contrast, Japanese national universities are overwhelmingly male. According to figures from the Japan Association of National Universities (2017), 69% of all students enrolled in all national universities are male. In the particular Japanese university from which we gathered data, 68% of all students enrolled were male. While our American sample reflects this distribution, the lower proportion of males in the Japanese sample indicates a greater unwillingness among Japanese male students to comply with requests to participate in this research.
Similar conclusions were reached with principal component analyses of the dichotomized items within nations (coded 0 for students who “never” engaged in the behavior during high school years and 1 for those who did). For both nations, the scree tests (Cattell 1966) indicated a single factor, and no major differences in factor loadings were obvious between nations. The Alphas for the sum of dichotomies were .68 in both the USA and Japan.
We could not use family income as another indicator of family socio-economic status because we knew, in advance, that a high percentage of college students would not provide an answer. In our previous cross-cultural survey, students were asked to choose one of seven income categories ranging from “less than $15,000” to “$100,000 or more” which were also converted to yen on the Japanese questionnaire. However, a high percentage of American students (12%) did not provide an answer. The figure was even higher—38%—for Japanese students. The greater non-response rate for the Japanese probably could be attributed to their greater reluctance to provide such information and the greater likelihood of not knowing their parent income. Consequently, parent income was not included in the present questionnaire and parent education was used as the indicator of family socio-economic status.
Some might argue that there are differences in results based on the use of standardized versus unstandardized scores. But we would note that we also ran the analyses of the relationships presented in Tables 3 and 4 using the scales with standardized variables and found that there was no significant difference in results from the two methods.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Marvin D. Krohn for his comments on the manuscript and his contribution to the data collection in the USA. We are also appreciative of the generosity of Ronald L. Akers in sharing the questionnaire used for the Boys Town Study. Additionally, we are grateful for the suggestions and insights on earlier versions of the manuscript from Harold G. Grasmick.
Funding
The research reported here was supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (No. 17K04095) from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
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Kobayashi, E., Farrington, D.P. & Buchanan, M. Peer Reactions, Peer Behavior, Student Attitudes, and Student Deviance: a Comparison of College Students in Japan and the USA. Asian J Criminol 14, 3–22 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-018-9276-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-018-9276-y