A Longitudinal Examination of an Integrated Social Process Model of Deviant Behavior

Abstract

A social process model of deviant behavior incorporating constructs derived from both social bonding and differential association theories is used to explain adolescent cigarette smoking. The model hypothesizes that the bonding constructs explain the variance in associating with adolescents who smoke andlor have favorable attitudes toward smoking. Both the bonding and differential association constructs are expected to have direct effects on adolescent cigarette smoking. Using a structural equation approach to analyze three years of panel data on 1,065 seventh to twelfth graders, support is found for the predicted interrelationships of the bonding and differential association constructs and the effects of those constructs on adolescent smoking in the third year of the study. The social control theory of Travis Hirschi and Edwin Sutherland's theory of differential association (Sutherland and Cressey 1978) are the two dominant social psychological perspectives on deviant behavior found in contemporary sociological literature. Although differential association theory was initially formulated many years prior to Hirschi's social control perspective, the latter's emergence on the theoretical landscape was immediately perceived as a significant alternative conceptualization of social deviance to that offered by differential association theory. More recently, however, researchers have suggested that a more complete theoretical