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Race, Ethnicity, and Adolescent Violent Victimization

  • Empirical Research
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Abstract

The risk of adolescent violent victimization in the United States varies considerably across racial and ethnic populations; it is unknown whether the sources of risk also vary by race and ethnicity. This study examined the correlates of violent victimization for White, Black, and Hispanic youth. Data collected from 11,070 adolescents (51 % female, mean age = 15.04 years) during the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health were used to estimate group-specific multilevel logistic regression models. The results indicate that male, violent offending, peer deviance, gang membership, and low self-control were significantly associated with increased odds of violent victimization for all groups. Some activities—including getting drunk, sneaking out, and unstructured socializing with peers—were risk factors for Black adolescents only; skipping school was a risk factor only for Hispanic adolescents. Although there are many similarities across groups, the findings suggest that minority adolescents are particularly vulnerable to violent victimization when they engage in some activities and minor forms of delinquency.

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Notes

  1. For the remainder of the article, we refer to non-Hispanic Whites as Whites and non-Hispanic Blacks as Blacks.

  2. Note that the Add Health includes special oversamples, such as Black adolescents with a parent who have a college degree. To account for this and other sampling design features, the present study used sampling weights provided with the Add Health data to create normalized weights that sum to N for each subsample. This removes the scale effect of the weights but retains the correct proportions between the weights, thus producing unbiased estimates and correct significance tests. For more information on how the Add Health created the sample weights, please see National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health: Grand Sample Weight at http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth/data/guides/weights.pdf.

  3. The remaining respondents identified as American Indian, Asian, or Other and were not included in the present study.

  4. As Snijders (2005: 2) describes in his discussion of power and sample size in multilevel modeling, the relatively low average cluster size of the present study (that is, adolescents per census tract) “has in itself no negative consequences for the power of testing regression coefficients. What is limited by this low average cluster size, is the power for testing random slope variances.” For this reason, we do not attempt to model any cross-level interactions. Our study, therefore, is unable to explore the ways in which neighborhood-level characteristics might moderate the individual-level effects, as has been demonstrated in prior multilevel victimization research (e.g., Wilcox et al. 2007). We return to this issue in the “Discussion” section.

  5. Diagnostics did not indicate multicollinearity among the study variables (variance inflation factors ≤1.73).

  6. Unfortunately, the Add Health does not include a measure of gang membership at Wave 1, so we included a Wave 2 measure of gang membership. As gang scholars have noted, an observed relationship between gang membership and violent victimization could represent facilitation, enhancement, or selection effects (see Gibson et al. 2012 for review). Given that violent victimization and gang membership are measured contemporaneously in the present study, readers should be cautious when interpreting the nature of the relationship between these two variables.

  7. We also created a parental supervision variable by taking the mean of seven dichotomous items asking whether the respondents’ parents allowed them to make their own decisions regarding the time they must be home on weekend nights, the people they hang around with, what they wear, how much television they watch, which television programs they watch, what time they go to bed on weeknights, and what they eat. The variable, which was non-significant across the models, was removed from the final analyses presented below due to weak internal consistency (alpha = 0.61).

  8. As described in note 4, Snijders (2005) cautions that a small number of individuals nested within an aggregate unit (i.e., census tract) limit the ability to test for cross-level interactions. Thus, we were unable to explore the ways in which neighborhood-level characteristics might moderate the individual-level effects, as has been demonstrated in prior multilevel victimization research (e.g., Wilcox et al. 2007).

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Acknowledgments

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by Grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from Grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.

Author Contributions

MT conceived of the study, participated in its design, performed the statistical analysis, and drafted the manuscript. RT conceived of the study, participated in its design and interpretation of the data, and helped to draft the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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  1. Department of Criminal Justice, University of Texas at San Antonio, 501 W. Cesar E. Chavez Blvd., San Antonio, TX, 78207, USA

    Marie Skubak Tillyer & Rob Tillyer

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Correspondence to Marie Skubak Tillyer.

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Tillyer, M.S., Tillyer, R. Race, Ethnicity, and Adolescent Violent Victimization. J Youth Adolescence 45, 1497–1511 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-016-0416-3

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