Depression and Law Violation: Gendered Responses to Gendered Stresses

Abstract

This article unites arguments from the sociology of mental health, criminology, and the sociology of gender to explore the role of gender in the stress process. The author proposes that gender acts upon the stress process in three ways. First, males and females may report exposure to different types of stresses. Second, males and females may be vulnerable to different types of stresses. Third, males and females may respond to stress in different ways—law violation versus depression. Arguments are tested about the relative importance of differential exposure versus differential vulnerability to various stresses for understanding the gender gaps in law violation and depression using the National Youth Survey, OLS regression, and Kessler's method for decomposing differences in exposure and vulnerability to stress. The results provide limited support for these arguments, suggesting that females report more exposure than do males to some communal stresses, whereas males report more exposure than do females to the agentic stresses included in this study. Vulnerability to these stresses also varies across gender, with females generally expressing greater vulnerability to communal stresses in the form of depression and males expressing greater vulnerability to agentic stresses in the form of law violation. Some deviations from this general pattern are discussed, and recommendations for future research follow.