Operationalizing the “American Dream”: A Comparison of Approaches

Abstract

Institutional anomie theory (IAT) attributes the relatively high levels of violent crime in the United States to a social structure characterized by institutional imbalance towards economic dominance and a cultural ethos known as the American Dream which emphasizes individual material success. One of the greatest challenges in testing IAT lies in how to measure these central structural and cultural constructs. While extant research has largely coalesced around the operationalization of institutional imbalance, the measurement of culture has been markedly inconsistent. Such inconsistency may account for the more equivocal support for its cultural dynamics relative to its institutional dynamics. Using data on 47 countries, this study compares several approaches to operationalizing the cultural ethos known as the American Dream and explores whether these different operationalizations produce consistent findings. Study results provide mixed support for the cultural dynamics of IAT regardless of which approach is used and indicate that the approach taken to the measurement of culture can result in entirely different conclusions. We discuss the implications of these findings for IAT and future research on the relationship between culture and crime.