Evaluations of different types of aggressive acts among a variety of male adolescent samples

Abstract

An aggression questionnaire measuring a subject's reaction along five evaluation measures—justification, aggressiveness, similarity, punishment and approval—to different types of aggressive behaviour was completed by three groups of subjects who were termed aggressive delinquents, non‐aggressive delinquents and non‐delinquents. The types of aggression inspected were reactive hostile aggression, initiatory instrumental aggression, social aggression, initiatory hostile aggression and reactive instrumental aggression. Analyses of variance found no global differences between the groups but group by type of aggression effects were significant on the similarity and approval measures. Aggressive delinquents were found to rate initiatory aggression more favourably than the other groups particularly the non‐delinquents. Percentage of total variance attributable to situations was found to be greater than that attributable to persons with all three groups and this was most evident with the non‐delinquents.