The Relationship Between Self-Control and Friendship Conflict: An analysis of Friendship Pairs.

Abstract

While Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime is one of the most empirically tested theories of deviance, the theory offers hypotheses that range far beyond how self-control should affect behavior. This study is broadly focused on how self-control operates between friends by considering how the general theory's main construct relates to friendship conflict. Using a large dyadic dataset, three-level hybrid item-response models regress the actor's proclivity to experience conflict with the friend onto measures of the actor's self-control, the friend's self-control, and an interaction between the self-control estimates. Results demonstrate that the actor's and the friend's self-control both significantly relate to friendship conflict, as the theory would expect. However, the actor's and friend's levels of self-control do not interact.