Social Attachment and Juvenile Attitudes toward the Police in China

Abstract

Objectives:

The purpose of this study is to examine the correlates of juvenile attitudes toward the police in the Chinese setting. It borrows from the prevailing criminological wisdom developed in the West and Confucian philosophical doctrines to shed light on how attachment to social institutions helps explain variation in juvenile sentiments of the police.

Method:

The data were collected from a sample of 2,679 high school students in a southwestern Chinese city. A second-order latent variable labeled social attachment is constructed and comprised of three lower order factors representing family attachment, neighborhood attachment, and school attachment. Traditional demographic background, victimization, and contact with the police variables commonly used in U.S. studies are included in the analysis. Structural equation modeling is employed to test hypothesized relationships among explanatory variables and juvenile attitudes toward the police.

Results:

The findings suggest that the higher order factor social attachment is the most robust predictor of juvenile evaluations of the police in China. Other commonly used demographic, socioeconomic, and police contact factors show limited utility.

Conclusion:

The findings lend support to propositions derived from the Western criminological theories and the eastern philosophical doctrine to a major extent. Both confirmations of expected findings and noteworthy surprises are discussed.

Keywords

juvenile attitudes toward the police social attachment China

Introduction

The youth–police relationship is an important area of research for at least two primary reasons. First, juveniles are likely to have disproportionate contacts with the police, either in school settings or in residential neighborhoods (Brick, Taylor, and Esbensen 2009; Hurst, Frank, and Browning 2000; Leiber, Nalla, and Farnworth 1998). Police officers often pay close attention to youth who appear unsupervised or “disoriented” at street corners or some known crime hot spots; their presence tends to elevate the levels of fear among local residents (Schuck 2013; Wilson and Kelling 1982). Second, adolescents’ perceptions of the police are likely to become fixed, producing an enduring effect carrying over well into adulthood (Wu, Lake, and Cao 2013). Relevant research suggests that carefully designed programs that promote positive interactions between police and youth are able to alter this historically antagonistic relationship (Bazemore and Senjo 1997). Understanding the important predictors of adolescents’ perceptions of the police can have significant policy implications for efforts to reduce this antagonism present in modern society.

To date, a few quantitative studies have been published in English concerning public attitudes toward the police in China, including comparisons among residents from multiple cities (Sun, Hu, and Wu 2012), among different social groups such as migrants, villagers, and urbanites (Sun et al. 2013), and between rural residents and urban residents (Michelson and Read 2011; Sun, Wu, and Hu 2013). However, none of these studies focus on juveniles; it is fair to say that juvenile attitudes toward the police in China have been a virtually completely neglected area of research. In contrast, there has been a steady increase in the volume and the quality of research on this topic in the United States since the late 1990s (for a review, see Brown and Benedict 2002). Recent studies have expanded from a documentation of general attitudes of youth toward the police, to the effect of race and ethnicity on attitude formation (Hagan, Shedd, and Payne 2005; Hurst et al. 2000; Lurigio, Greenleaf, and Flexon 2009), to gender differences (Hurst, McDermott, and Thomas 2005), to the attitudes of rural school students (Hurst 2007), to racial and ethnic identity and police legitimacy (Lee, Steinberg, and Piquero 2010), and to the developmental trajectory of perceptions of the police by youth (Schuck 2013). In addition to featuring the aforementioned factors/aspects, several recent studies have utilized theories of juvenile delinquency to examine the influence of sociocultural context on youth–police relation; theories such as social bonding/attachment (Wu et al. 2013), delinquent subculture (Brick et al. 2009; Leiber et al. 1998; Schuck 2013), and conflict theory with respect to race and ethnicity (Hagan et al. 2005) have been incorporated innovatively to the U.S. literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine the determinants of juvenile attitudes toward the police in the Chinese social setting. A primary feature of this study concerns its blending of the wisdom derived from criminological theories developed in the West with the distinctive mark of Chinese culture.¹ The data were collected from a sample of 2,679 high school students in a city with 3.8 million population located in the southwest region of China. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the hypothesized relationships among explanatory variables and endogenous latent constructs. This study endeavors to make at least two important contributions to the literature of youth–police relationship with respect to the impact of institutional attachments on juveniles. First, attachment is a key concept in American criminological theories such as social control theory (Hirschi 1969) and theory of collective efficacy (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997). Likewise, social attachment is often identified as the cultural foundation of Chinese society and the primary mechanism of internalization of Chinese values (Cao and Hou 2001; Curran 1998). In this study, we develop a measure of social attachment that draws upon the wisdom from the empirically grounded theories from the West and the philosophical doctrine from the East. Second, race and ethnicity undoubtedly are the primary focus of public attitudes toward the American police. The rich demographic characteristics of our sample enable us to include ethnicity in the analysis for the purpose of exploring its impact on juvenile perceptions of the police in China. While the great majority of Chinese people are of the Han nationality, an increasingly well-known “secret” is that there are 55 officially recognized ethnic groups scattered across China, and several major ethnic groups live in the five areas designated as the autonomous regions (equivalent to provinces/states) where the percentage of a particular ethnic minority group is high. Even a cursory review of the literature on public confidence in Chinese police reveals that no published study has featured empirical data on any of these ethnic minority groups.

Literature Review

Social Attachment in Western Criminological Theories

Social attachment in this study is defined as an individual’s affective bonding to an institution in his or her interactions with society. For adolescents, the principal social attachments of interest include the family, the neighborhood wherein he or she interacts with neighbors and plays with friends, and the school where he or she acquires knowledge, learns skills, and associates with peers (e.g., Hirschi 1969). In Western philosophy, social attachment is considered a virtual cornerstone of human society. Aristotle famously argued that “man is by nature a social animal” and human interactions and attachments initiate with the first layer of society, the nuclear family. The heritage of Western political philosophy features a variety of propositions regarding different ways in which individuals can become attached to their society. Attachment to others through belief in God was emphasized by St. Augustine; economically derived and class-oriented attachment was emphasized by Karl Marx; and rational fear-induced commitment to protective human relationships was emphasized by Thomas Hobbs. Early criminological theories accordingly reflect an emphasis upon the individual attachment to one’s social environment. For example, based on empirical data, Durkheim (1951:209) observed that there was an inverse association between suicide rates and social integration as related to attachment to three particular institutions—the prevailing religion, “domestic” society, and political processes.

Subsequent criminological theories of delinquency remain focused on the individual’s attachment to institutions as an effective means of curbing deviant behaviors. For example, Hirschi (1969) identified four essential elements of social control, and among them attachment to family and attachment to school are at the virtual core of his theory. Empirical research generally supports the connection between one’s attachment to these institutions and positive view of the police. Nihart et al. (2005), for example, found that adolescents’ attachments to parents and teachers exert a positive influence on their ratings of the police. The effects of attachment to school on adolescents’ ratings of the police have been documented in three separate studies (Flexon, Lurigio, and Greenleaf 2009; Levy 2001; Lurigio et al. 2009). Most recently, using survey data collected from six U.S. cities, Wu et al. (2013) found that students’ reported attachment to parents and commitment to school had direct and positive effects on their ratings of the police.

Noticeably different from theories of attachment to family and school, attachment to one’s neighborhood comes from separate source of intellectual heritage; place-based criminology is often traced back to the Chicago School’s conception of social ecology and related social disorganization theory (e.g., Park 1952). The concept of community collective efficacy added an important element of neighborhood attachment in the 1990s; this concept was originally developed by Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls (1997:921) based on their study of differential crime and delinquency rates across Chicago neighborhoods. The concept in question reflects the “willingness and intentions to intervene on behalf of the neighborhood would be enhanced under conditions of mutual trust and cohesion.”

Collective efficacy has been used in a considerable number of subsequent studies (e.g., Burchfield 2009; Gibson et al. 2002; Silver and Miller 2004). For example, Ren et al. (2005) found that collective efficacy (also referred to as collective security) was a robust predictor of citizen confidence in the police (also see Huebner, Schafer, and Bynum 2004; Lai, Cao, and Zhao 2010). In the research literature on neighborhood attachment, two related dimensions are explored—namely, attitudinal attachment and behavioral attachment. Attitudinal attachment reflects the degree to which residents are satisfied with their neighborhoods as a place to live (with respect to neighbors, amenities, access to transportation, etc.; Burchfield 2009; Gibson et al. 2002). Behavioral attachment, in contrast, is related to residents’ willingness to intervene in an event (e.g., loud party) on behalf of neighbors and/or neighborhood quality of life (a reflection of collective efficacy; Silver and Miller 2004).

Social Attachment as a Conceptual Framework in China

More than 2,000 years ago, Confucius proposed an “ideal type” society that is governed by broadly shared virtue and a ubiquitous set of moral principles, the violation of which brings on a deep sense of individual shame and remorse. This informal and self-regulated mechanism of appropriate social conduct continues to serve as a model of human conduct for Chinese people (Chen 2004). The very essence of Confucian philosophy entails the achievement of social harmony (or “greatest unity”)—a goal that emphasizes collective behaviors and downplays individual accomplishments and claims of personal rights in Chinese society (Anderson and Gil 1998; Ren 1997). In order to learn and internalize the group-based moral principles, Confucius placed particular emphasis upon a learning process oriented toward social attachment starting at an early age within families, and later entailing progressively extensive social institutions through adolescence and into one’s adulthood (Chen 2002). Consequently, social attachment/bonding to one’s family, neighbors, work unit, and schools is deemed to be essential to the process of internalizing values of informal self-control in order to maintain social harmony (Jiang, Wang, and Lambert 2010; Lai et al. 2010).

Social attachment and bonding both play the role of “ever-increasing levels of ‘patient persuasion’ from other members of society” in order to develop a foundation for a sense of shame after engaging in deviant conduct (Anderson and Gil 1998:250). The innate goodness of mankind underlies the self-shaming conduct. The explicit assumption being made in this study is that the stronger the social attachment or more intense the bonding an individual possesses, the more likely he or she has internalized societal shared values and can exercise self-control to promote social harmony.

In modern China, an adolescent is surely considered an asset to a neighborhood if he or she is attached to his or her family, gets along well with his or her neighbors, and excels in his or her school performance (Huang and Gove 2012). In this connection, Liang (2010:209) noted the following: “Indeed, we can say that Confucius was the first sage in human history to advocate universal education.” Similarly, Zhang and Messner (1996:287) posited that China has a long tradition of honoring and respecting teachers and formal learning, a tradition deeply rooted in Confucian philosophy (also see Zhang 2008). Comparing the cultural differences between China and United States, Jiao (2001:158) pointed out that the Chinese cultural context is rooted in moral order, communitarianism, and collectivism (also see Jiang and Lambert 2009). It is important to note that despite the rapid economic growth and widespread social change occurring in modern China, the influence of Confucian thought remains omnipresent and salient in the hearts and minds of Chinese people (Chen 2002; Jiao 2001). If any demographic group is less inclined to internalize Confucian mores and precepts, it would be the youth, whose life experience has been suffused with relative economic affluence and marked social change.

Traditional Factors Associated with Juvenile Attitudes toward the Police

A review of research on juvenile attitudes toward the police leads to the identification of at least 19 studies making use of explanatory factors reflecting three distinctive areas. The first area concerns a set of demographic background factors considered baseline for any adequate attitudinal study (Lai et al. 2010). In this regard, race and ethnicity receive the thorough and ongoing research attention of U.S. scholars. Particularly, race has been singled out as the most prominent and significant predictor (for a review, see Brown and Benedict 2002). Relevant studies have consistently found that African Americans express more negative attitudes toward the police than Whites in adult samples (e.g., Cao, Frank, and Cullen 1996; Frank, Smith, and Novak 2005; Reisig and Parks 2000; Weitzer and Tuch 2006) as well as in juvenile samples (e.g., Brick et al. 2009; Hagan et al. 2005; Hurst 2007; Lee et al. 2010; Schuck 2013; Wu et al. 2013). Since the mid-1990s, research on public attitudes toward the police has included a focus on ethnicity, reflecting the demographic change toward ethnic and racial diversity in the United States. Several studies that paid particular attention to Hispanic youth show that Hispanic juveniles tend to hold more negative perceptions of the police than non-Hispanic Whites (Brick et al. 2009; Hagan et al. 2005; Lurigio et al. 2009; Wu et al. 2013).

Gender is another commonly used background variable, and relevant research suggests that female youth tend to rate the police higher than their male counterparts (Hurst and Frank 2000; Hurst et al. 2000). The third demographic background variable, age, is often considered to be positively correlated with the ratings of the police principally because young people have disproportionate contact with the police, and for most youth who experience such contact it tends to be negative in nature (Brick et al. 2009; Lai et al. 2010). In addition to race/ethnicity, gender, and age, the existing literature suggests that socioeconomic status is often considered a variable of interest. In Chinese society, socioeconomic status often gives rise to very different types of family settings (Cao and Hou 2001). For example, students from a migrant/working-class family have far less opportunity to succeed than their peers from a governmental service cadre or prosperous business family. Some studies of public attitudes toward the police have found that individuals of lower socioeconomic status did have relatively unfavorable opinions on the police in comparison with their more prosperous counterparts (e.g., Cao et al. 1996; Lai et al. 2010).

In addition to these demographic background variables, victimization experience has virtually always been included in the analysis of citizen attitudes toward the police because crime victims are inclined to hold the police responsible for their failure to protect them (Ren et al. 2005). Similarly, the variable contact with the police has been used in almost every study of juvenile perceptions of the police; findings in this area generally support the argument that negative interactions with the police tend to reduce citizen ratings of police (Brick et al. 2009; Hurst 2007; Hurst et al. 2000; Leiber et al. 1998; Lurigio et al. 2009). For example, Geistman and Smith (2007) found that juveniles in trouble with law enforcement were likely to give low ratings of police (also see Brick et al. 2009; Leiber et al. 1998) while positive interactions between students and police officers associated with community policing programs and drug education curricula often lead to higher ratings (Bazemore and Senjo 1997; Schuck 2013). The community policing style of law enforcement is likely to reflect a communitarian approach to juveniles instead of a legalistic approach more typical of policing in many urban areas (Hurst 2007).

Method

Social Context of Prefecture City W and Data Gathered

The research site of the present study is a prefecture city W located in a less-developed southwestern province of China.² City W occupies 4,247 square miles and features a rich history spanning over 1,000 years. The city is comprised of two core urban districts and two populous counties. The city’s population is approximately 3.8 million, among whom the ethnic minority population accounts for approximately 11 percent; 1.40 million persons were residents of the two urban districts in 2012. Traditional values reflecting the Confucian moral code run deep among local residents, and informal social attachments remain strong. Traditional institutions, such as long-standing neighborhood committees and villagers’ committees, permeate the city; there are 75 neighborhood committees and close to 1,000 villagers’ committees in city W.

The youth survey data were collected from all 22 high schools (including the only private school) in city W by using a multistage cluster sampling technique. In each school, one class was randomly selected from each grade (10, 11, and 12), except in one newly opened high school (with only grade 10) and one school that is being closed (with only grade 11 and grade 12). Four schools selected through this process declined the request to permit the 12th graders to participate in the survey due to their being in preparation for the highly competitive national college entrance exam. Consequently, one more class in either the 10th grade or the 11th grade in these four schools was randomly selected for study participation. The survey instrument was pretested in a small group of the 10th to 12th graders; the self-administered survey was conducted between November and December 2012 without the presence of teachers or administrators at all survey completion sessions. The students were informed of the purpose of the study and assured of their anonymity and voluntary participation in the survey. The total sample size achieved was 2,961 respondents, and the response rate attained was 96.9 percent.³

Dependent Variables

The dependent variable in this study, juvenile attitudes toward the police, is a latent construct manifested by five observed items commonly employed in public perceptions of the police—namely, (1) police are courteous, (2) police are effective in controlling crime and protecting lives and property, (3) I have a high-level trust in the police, (4) I am very satisfied with the job that police do in my neighborhood, and (5) In general, I like police. Students were asked to rate these 5 items on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). These items reflect overall trust in and respect for the police (Brick et al. 2009; Hurst et al. 2000; Leiber et al. 1998; Wu et al. 2013), perceptions of police performance and effectiveness in crime control (Hurst 2007), and personal satisfaction with the police.

Explanatory Variables

Three latent constructs are used to tap into the important realm of social attachment. The first latent construct, family attachment, is derived from social bonding theory (Hirschi 1969; Wu et al. 2013). The three manifest variables characterize the relationship between a respondent and both the male and female guardians with whom he or she lived; respondents replied on a scale ranging from 1 = unable to get along to 4 = get along very well. The third manifest measure probed the frequency of one’s family doing things together on a scale ranging from 1 = rarely to 6 = more than once a week. The second latent construct, neighborhood attachment, is derived from four observed variables and combines the measure of emotional and participative attachment to one’s neighborhood on the basis of items such as “I like my neighbor,” “People in my neighborhood can be trusted,” and “This is a close-knit neighborhood.” The fourth variable in this set of items—“People around here are willing to help their neighbors”—measures perceptions of the willingness of neighbors to intervene, a key aspect of collective efficacy (Burchfield 2009). The final latent factor gauges the concept of school attachment and derives from four manifest variables. The measure covers not only students’ emotional attachment to school (such as “If I had to move I would miss my school” and “I like my school”) but also includes attachment both to their teachers and to after-school activities (e.g., Hirsch 1969; Lurigio et al. 2009; Wu et al. 2013). Responses were scored on a 4-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 4 = strongly agree.

Conventional analytical models investigating attitudes toward the police typically include a set of demographic background items, crime victimization experience, and police encounter history (Leiber et al. 1998; Ren et al. 2005). In the analysis presented here, there are a total of eight variables capturing such hypothesized influences, and several of these are uniquely tailored to the Chinese setting. Gender is expressed as a binary variable, with 0 being female and 1 male, and ethnicity is coded as 0 = ethnic minority and 1 = Han. Similar to Hagan et al.’s (2005) study carried out in Chicago schools, age is measured as the grade level of the student at the time of the survey. Except for large urban cities on the Chinese east coast, it is rather common for high school students in China to live on a residential campus. The variable campus residence was added to capture this information, and it is coded as on-campus (1) and off-campus (0). Type of family structure is also included in this analysis as intact family (1) versus non-intact family (0; Leiber et al. 1998). Intact families refer to two-parent households, while nonintact families include single-parent households or the households where students live with people other than their both parents.

The next three dichotomous variables are used to gauge the social status of students, using the categories of urban white-collar family (either parent is in governmental cadre, intellectual, or business proprietor or management occupations), urban blue-collar family, and rural family. The latter is used as the reference group in the statistical analyses. Students from a rural family are generally at a disadvantage with respect to resources at his or her disposal. The last two variables, crime victimization experience and negative contact with the police, are typically included in research on attitudes toward the police (e.g., Ren et al. 2005; Schuck and Rosenbaum 2005) and generally are significant predictors of both adult and juvenile attitudes toward the police (Geistman and Smith 2007; Hurst et al. 2000; Wu et al. 2013). The crime victimization item documents whether or not a student has been a victim of either violent or property crimes during the 12 months preceding the survey.⁴ The negative contacts with the police item is expressed as a natural logarithm of the number of negative contacts with the police reported, including being stopped for questioning on the street or being arrested by the police.⁵ In China, school students’ negative contacts with the police are rather limited; consequently, the negative contacts with the police item includes not only the experiences of the survey respondents but also those negative experiences of their parents, relatives, and close friends of which they were aware.

The Statistical Model

SEM is used for the analyses because it can control for the direct and indirect effects of exogenous and endogenous variables simultaneously (Schumacker and Lomax 2004). In addition, SEM has the advantage of being able to incorporate latent variables derived from observed measures, and it can model the structural relations discovered pictorially to enable a clear conceptualization of the theory under study. In this study, all analyses were conducted by using Mplus version 6, and the model parameters were estimated using the maximum likelihood algorithm. A variety of absolute and relative (or incremental) indices were consulted to assess model fit. The absolute fit index includes χ² statistics, where χ² is the likelihood ratio statistic used to test whether a given model provides an acceptable fit to relevant observed data. Generally, the accepted rule is that χ²/df needs to be below 5 for a large sample (Wheaton et al. 1977). Another absolute fit indicator, “one of the most informative fit indices” according to Diamantopoulos and Siguaw (2000:85), is the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) which takes the error of population approximation and degrees of freedom into account and characterizes the lack of fit of the hypothesized model to the population covariance matrix. In more recent studies, the cutoff points of RMSEA have been reduced to below .06 (Hu and Bentler 1999) to constitute a good fit.

Two incremental fit indices are commonly used in SEM. The comparative fit index (CFI) is the most commonly used; it assesses “the fit of a user-specified solution in relation to a more restricted, nested baseline model” in which the “covariances among all input indicators are fixed to zero” positing no relationship among variables (Brown 2006:84). The CFI statistic ranges from 0 to 1.00, with values greater than .95 indicating a reasonably good fit between the hypothesized model and the empirical data (Hu and Bentler 1999). The Tucker–Lewis Index (TLI) or Nonnormed Fit Index is the other measure suggested by Jöreskog and Sörbom (1989) for assessing a model’s overall fit; this statistic is based on a ratio of the squared sum of discrepancies to the observed variances. A TLI value around .95 or larger indicates a good fit (Hu and Bentler 1999; Loehlin 1992; Schumacker and Lomax 2004).

The Conceptual Model

A unique feature of this study is the inclusion of three attachment constructs along with the conventional demographic background, crime victimization, and police contacts to predict juvenile attitudes toward the police. A review of the literature suggests that the concept of social attachment and its basic three types have a long history in both eastern culture and western culture. Contemporary criminological theories offer different accounts of the origins of family attachment and school attachment, and the emotional and psychological bonding associated with them (Hirschi 1969; Leiber et al. 1998); likewise for place-based neighborhood attachment (e.g., Gibson et al. 2002; Sampson et al. 1997; Silver and Miller 2004). Confucian thoughts tend to view different types of attachments as a unitary socialization and learning process essential to achieving social harmony or greatest unity. Accordingly, we draw upon the wisdom from both the West and the East to examine the role of attachment in juvenile attitudes toward the police. Specifically, we develop a second-order factor labeled social attachment comprised of three lower order factors that represent family attachment, neighborhood attachment, and school attachment. This overarching higher order social attachment factor is hypothesized to cause each of the three first-order measures and to capture adolescents’ overall perceived attachment to social institutions in a conceptually and methodologically meaningful way (Byrne 2012; Byrne, Stewart, and Lee 2004).

That is, a youth’s familial, neighborhood, and school attachment may each be influenced by the higher order social attachment. The use of a second-order factor loading variable in the conceptual model permits us to determine whether family attachment, neighborhood attachment, and school attachment contribute equally or differentially toward an overall sense of attachment. More importantly, the variance shared by the three types of attachment in the Chinese cultural settings may play a major role in the prediction of juvenile perceptions of the police, over and above the variance of the individual attachment components. Although the use of the higher order factors as predictors in SEM is not uncommon in psychometric studies (e.g., Alessandri and Vecchione 2012; DeYoung, Peterson, and Higgins 2002), empirical findings derived from this statistical approach are rare in criminal justice research in general (e.g., Hagan et al. 1998), and in juvenile confidence in the police research in particular. To the best of our knowledge, no study has examined the link of second-order social attachment with juvenile attitudes toward the police.

Figure 1 pictorially presents the propositions we developed to test the relationship among explanatory variables and the dependent variable. Our first and most central proposition is that an overall social attachment factor reflecting three latent traits of family, neighborhood, and school attachments is a significant predictor of juvenile attitudes toward the police. The second general proposition is that gender, grade level, and campus residence are significant predictors of the attitudes of juveniles toward the police (Geistman and Smith 2007; Hurst et al. 2000; Leiber et al. 1998; Wu et al. 2013). Our next proposition is that ethnicity is associated with juvenile attitudes toward the police because Han ethnicity represents the majority of the population in the city. This proposition is based on research findings in the United States that African American and Latino students rated the police significantly lower than their White non-Hispanic counterparts (e.g., Brick et al. 2009; Lurigio et al. 2009). The fifth proposition is that there is a significant association between family structure and juvenile attitudes toward the police (Leiber et al. 1998). Students from well-to-do families are more likely to express positive assessments of the police than their counterparts from less prosperous rural families. Finally, it is hypothesized that crime victimization and negative contacts with the police are associated with unfavorable juvenile perceptions of the police (Geistman and Smith 2007; Hurst et al. 2000).

Figure 1.

Hypothesized model of juvenile attitudes toward the police.

Findings

The descriptive statistics for each of the variables included in the analysis are reported in Table 1. Since this study uses SEM with confirmatory factor analysis, the means of all of the manifest variables are reported for initial assessment of the appropriateness of the model for the data to be analyzed. For the dependent variable, the means of all five observed variables representing juvenile attitudes toward the police suggest that respondents tend to rate the police positively, with the items ranging from a high of 2.91 of the 4 (police are effective in controlling crime and protecting lives and property) to a low of 2.50 of the 4 (I am very satisfied with the job the police do in my neighborhood). The positive ratings are quite similar to the results of previous studies on this topic carried out in the United States (e.g., Geistman and Smith 2007; Hurst et al. 2000; Taylor et al. 2001). The mean distribution of manifest variables measuring attachment to family, neighborhood, and school suggest that students were highly bonded to these three institutions, with a high mean of 3.56 of the 4 (get along with your female guardian you live with) to a low of 2.68 of the 4 (teachers do notice when I am doing well and let me know). Overall, the rating of family attachment is the highest of the three. The positive ratings of the family, neighborhood, and school strongly suggest that Chinese students maintain close ties with their parents, their neighbors, and the teachers and staff at their respective schools as they progress toward adulthood.

Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics.

Variables	Measure	M	SD	Frequency (%)
Endogenous variables
Juvenile attitudes toward the police
P1: Police are courteous	Ordinal (1–4)	2.63	0.9
P2: Police are effective in controlling crime and protecting lives and properties	Ordinal (1–4)	2.91	0.92
P3: I have a high level of trust in the police	Ordinal (1–4)	2.62	0.93
P4: I am very satisfied with the job the police do in my neighborhood	Ordinal (1–4)	2.5	0.92
P5: In general, I like police	Ordinal (1–4)	2.59	0.96
Explanatory variables
Family attachment
F1: Get along with the man you live with	Ordinal (1–4)	3.37	0.64
F2: Get along with the woman you live with	Ordinal (1–4)	3.56	0.59
F3: The frequency of family doing things together	Ordinal (1–6)	3.11	1.41
Neighborhood attachment
N1: I like my neighborhood	Ordinal (1–4)	3.00	0.92
N2: People in this neighborhood can be trusted	Ordinal (1–4)	2.96	0.9
N3: People around here are willing to help their neighbors	Ordinal (1–4)	3.13	0.88
N4: This is a close-knit neighborhood	Ordinal (1–4)	3.01	0.89
School attachment
S1: If I had to move I would miss my school	Ordinal (1–4)	3.05	0.92
S2: Teachers do notice when I am doing well and let me know	Ordinal (1–4)	2.68	0.9
S3: I like my school	Ordinal (1–4)	2.7	0.95
S4: There are other activities in school besides lessons	Ordinal (1–4)	2.91	1.02
Control variables
Gender	Nominal (0 = female, 1 = male)			48.64
Ethnicity	Nominal (0 = minority, 1 = Han)			87.34
Grade level	Ordinal (1–3)	1.96	0.82
Campus residence	Nominal (0 = no, 1 = yes)			85.28
Intact family	Nominal (0 = no, 1 = yes)			93.61
Urban white-collar family	Nominal (0 = no, 1 = yes)			6.88
Urban blue-collar family	Nominal (0 = no, 1 = yes)			18.35
Rural family	Nominal (0 = no, 1 = yes)			74.54
Victimization	Nominal (0 = no, 1 = yes)			27.42
Negative contacts with the police (LN)	Ratio	0.18	0.38

Note: SD = standard deviation; LN = natural logarithm transformation. N = 2,679.

The demographic background variables indicate that 48.6 percent of survey participants were male students. Ethnic minority students accounted for 12.7 percent of the students surveyed, which closely resembles the percentage of minority population in the city (11 percent). About 85.3 percent students were campus residents,⁶ and students from intact family backgrounds accounted for an overwhelming majority of the sample (93.6 percent). Similar to the distribution of the city population, 74.5 percent of the students are from families which come to city W from rural areas, while only 6.9 percent of the students indicate urban white-collar family backgrounds. About 27.4 percent of students claimed to have had a crime victimization experience in the past 12 months. The logarithmic average number of negative contacts with the police is .2 among those respondents who had any negative contacts with the police; 79.1 percent indicated no negative contacts.

The completely standardized factor solution and coefficients associated with an SEM analysis with five latent variables are displayed in Figure 2 and detailed in Table 2. Overall, the model fit indices meet all the criteria of SEM, suggesting that the theoretical model fits the empirical data well. For example, the ratio of χ² to its degrees of freedom is 4.26, below the conventional limit of 5 for a large sample. The CFI and TLI are .960 and .955, respectively; both are above the acceptable level of .95. Finally, the RMSEA is .035, well below the conventional cutoff point of .06, and the R ² for the equation is quite satisfactory at .362, comparing favorably with other studies on this topic.⁷ Moreover, all of the manifest variables are significantly loaded on their respective latent factors. For example, the factor loadings for juvenile attitudes toward the police are all above .70, indicating a strong link between this theoretical concept and the observed variables (see Appendix for a summary of confirmatory factor analysis). It can also be seen from Appendix that while the neighborhood attachment items were more or less equally loaded on the neighborhood attachment factor, there was obvious disparity among the family attachment and school attachment items. In other words, whereas the variance of the neighborhood attachment factor was contributed equally by its constituent items, the variance of the family attachment factor was dominated by items F1 and F2. Similarly, the variance of the school attachment factor was dominated by items S1 and S3. It is noteworthy that the three latent traits were all significantly loaded on the higher order factor labeled social attachment, suggesting that there is indeed a strong foundation for this overarching factor perceived among the Chinese students. This second-order factor strongly influenced school attachment (.621) and neighborhood attachment (.615) but only moderately predicted family attachment (.394), which indicates that the overall perceived social attachment measured by the scale was more neighborhood and school attachment than family attachment in our sample. A similar pattern was reported with regard to family support by Cheng and Chan (2004) in their study of the multidimensional scale of perceived social support among adolescents.

Figure 2.

Empirical model of juvenile attitudes toward the police (N = 2,679).

Table 2.

The Standardized Effects of Family Attachment, Neighborhood Attachment, School Attachment, Demographic Background Variables on Juvenile Attitudes toward the Police.

Standardized Estimate	SE	Estimation/SE
Social attachment	.576	.024	24.420***
Gender	.043	.019	2.272*
Ethnicity	−.037	.018	−1.990*
Grade level	−.092	.018	−4.987***
Campus residence	−.024	.019	−1.286
Intact family	−.01	.018	−0.566
Urban white-collar family	−.059	.019	−3.160**
Urban blue-collar family	−.03	.019	−1.598
Victimization	−.07	.019	−3.749***
Negative contacts with the police (LN)	−.102	.019	−5.426***
	R ² = .362

Note: LN = natural logarithm transformation. N = 2,679.

*Significant at p < .05. **Significant at p < .01. ***Significant at p < .001.

The standardized coefficient of the higher order factor for social attachment shows that it has the largest effect on these juveniles’ attitudes toward the police (.576). The variance explained by this higher order factor is surprisingly greater than all the demographic, socioeconomic, and police–youth contact variables combined.⁸ Interestingly, results reveal that Chinese male students tend to rate the police more positively than their female counterparts. This is quite different from findings reported in the research literature in the United States. Similarly, Chinese ethnic minority students express higher ratings of the police than the majority Han students. Again, this finding differs greatly from the results reported for African American and Latino youth–police relations documented in the U.S. research literature (Hagan et al. 2005; Lee at al. 2010; Lurigio et al. 2009). It is clear that the explanatory power of both gender and ethnicity are statistically significant, but rather marginal in magnitude. Grade level in school is negatively correlated with juvenile attitudes toward the police, as expected. The variable rural family is used as a reference group in this study; our findings indicate that students from white-collar family backgrounds unexpectedly rated the police significantly less favorably than their peers hailing from less prosperous rural households. Not surprisingly, consistent with similar studies conducted in the United States, both crime victimization and negative contacts with the police yielded statistically significant associations with juvenile attitudes toward the police; both conditions contribute to negative assessments of the police.

Discussion and Conclusion

Perhaps the key finding of this study concerns the high predictive value of social attachment on Chinese adolescents’ attitudes toward the police. A unique feature of this study is that three separate but related dimensions of social attachment coalesce into a higher order set of attachments. Western theories of juvenile delinquency developed over the course of the second half of last century tend to focus on the juvenile’s attachment to family and school (e.g., Hirschi 1969; Hurst 2007; Wu et al. 2013) and identification with the subculture of delinquency (e.g., Brick et al. 2009; Geistman and Smith 2007; Leiber et al. 1998). In contrast, place-based theories give primary attention to social capital and collective efficacy among the neighborhood’s adult population, focusing on citizens’ participation in activities promoting community welfare and willingness to intervene when deviant behaviors by juveniles or adults occur (Gibson et al. 2002). In moving to the Chinese setting, the primary grounding of Eastern culture is undoubtedly Confucianism, a philosophical tradition that strongly emphasizes an individual’s attachment to a broader family-centered structure (environment) and internalizes societal values through socialization (learns societal values through one’s ties with social institutions; Chen 2002). The principal goal of Confucianism is the achievement of a state of self-regulated social harmony (Jiao 2001).

As part of the SEM, the results of the second-order confirmatory factor analysis support the notion that a Chinese youth’s family, neighborhood, and school attachments are significantly influenced by the higher order social attachment factor. The SEM results show that this overarching social attachment—likely reflecting a broad array of bonds beyond family, school, and neighborhood—is the most robust and powerful predictor of youth attitudes toward the police in the multivariate analysis, above and beyond the individual attachment components. Quite in line with the goal of Confucianism, the Chinese students who develop strong attachment to family, neighborhood, and school tend to generalize favorable attachment to the police. As with family, neighborhood, and school, attachment to the police appears to be a logical extension for the promotion of social harmony for contemporary Chinese youth.⁹ Meanwhile, conventional variables such as grade level, crime victimization, and negative contact with the police that are normally included in the analysis of adults’ or juveniles’ attitudes toward the police show only limited utility; their contribution to the prediction of student attitudes is rather small compared to that of social attachment.

Next, neighborhood attachment stands out from the three dimensions of social attachment in that its constituent items loaded equally well and the influence of the overall sense of social attachment was strong in magnitude. These two findings reflect the importance of neighborhood environment in China, a feature of Chinese society that warrants further discussion. Neighborhood in China is not only a place to live but also a place for intimate interactions with neighbors and volunteer public service activities associated with neighborhood organizations. In urban areas, a neighborhood is usually comprised of multilevel apartment complexes with high population density. Neighborhood committees are omnipresent and largely operated by local retired volunteers who gather information and organize neighborhood activities (Lai et al. 2010). Different from motorized patrol practice in the United States, the majority of police officers in China are assigned to work in police mini-stations located in neighborhoods and they know most of the local residents by name and their family connections (Jiao 2001). Crime rates are extremely low and morning/evening group exercises (e.g., dancing and Taiji practice) usually attract a large crowd of participants, providing a convenient channel for them to keep updated about positive and negative incidents alike happening in their neighborhoods.¹⁰ In rural areas, neighbors are relatives and/or close friends whose families have known each other for generations. Similar social infrastructures such as villagers’ committees and police mini-stations are in place in rural areas. The traditional culture featuring tight social bonds runs even stronger in rural areas than urban settings.

Also noteworthy are findings different from those reported in studies on American juveniles (e.g., Hagan et al. 2005; Lurigio et al. 2009; Wu et al. 2013). For example, Chinese minority students rated the police more favorably than their majority counterparts. This is most unexpected, given theories originated in American research to explain why race/ethnicity matters in the research on public attitudes toward the police. In this regard, group positioning theory holds that minority groups tend to be treated differently because they are likely to be viewed as a threat by the dominant majority group. Similarly, stratification theory highlights the role of the police in suppressing the underclass, a social stratum wherein minority groups tend to reside (Blau and Blau 1982; Blumer 1958; Bobo and Tuan 2006; Cao 2011). Consequently, the two theories lead to an unavoidable conclusion that the police act as a strong arm of an oppressive and biased government (Cao 2011). Given our unexpected findings among Chinese students, we offer a speculation. Our speculation arises from the substantial difference in social roles carried out by American police and Chinese police. American police constitute a legalistic force designed to ensure compliance with society’s rules; uniformed officers are armed and empowered to enforce the law as their primary professional duty (Bittner 1972). In his comparison between American and Chinese styles of policing, Jiao (2001:161) argued that in contrast to the self-effacing Chinese approach to interaction between the police and the public, the American values of individualism and upholding of rights encourage emotional expressiveness and defensiveness in police/citizen interactions. This value system of celebrating individual freedom and individuality and the need to enforce obedience to the law on the part of police largely determines the American style of compliance-focused policing (Bittner 1972).

In contrast, though Chinese policing is gravitating toward a more formal organizational approach, it is nonetheless the case that the use of informal social control and the promotion of good public relations remain the central dimensions of their mission (Jiao 2001). Under the ubiquitous umbrella of social harmony, mediation of differences is generally the preferred approach to solving problems; that predisposition even includes cases of violent offenses occurring in a thoroughly relation-based society. Accordingly, most police officers in China are unarmed and are assigned to work primarily in a designated neighborhood. It follows that Chinese police officers’ daily contacts with residents are more likely to be about information gathering and mediation than law enforcement (Cao and Hou 2001).

Ethnographic studies of Chinese ethnic minority groups suggest that, different from what is proposed by group positioning theory and stratification theory developed in Western societies, ethnic minority groups in the province of the study have not posed a threat to the dominant majority group since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (Wei 2011). Rather than being suppressed, the ethnic minority groups are protected by various laws and preferential policies. For example, ethnic minority students are often awarded bonus points in the competitive national college entrance examination to ensure group access to Chinese society’s higher status occupations. Similarly, these students are more likely to have siblings than the students of Han nationality because the “one-child policy” is not strictly enforced among them. It is speculated that the feeling of being “protected” rather than being suppressed may lead the ethnic minority students to rate police more favorably than students of Han nationality. In addition, Chinese students from rural family background reported more favorable views of the police than their counterparts from urban white-collar family backgrounds. Since the Compulsory Education Law in China makes the nine-year education (six-year primary school and three-year middle school) mandatory only for the 6- to 15-year-old age group, rural students who come to study in high schools (10th–12th grade) in the city tend to be the relatively well-to-do ones who live on campus, behave well, and study the most diligently for the national college entrance examination. As a result, these students might be of less concern to the local police than other youth.

This study features some noteworthy observations; however, findings from the present study need to be considered in light of several limitations. Our measures of three attachment components are largely derived from western research; the dimensions of attachment and the operationalization of the manifest variables are all based on U.S. studies. Future research should feature variables that have a particular connection to Chinese cultural values such as Chinese perceptions of human modesty, social harmony, and role of the police. In the same vein, in spite of the speculation we offered, we are still intrigued by the finding that students from rural family backgrounds rated the police more favorably than did urban white-collar background youth. What dynamics underlie this finding most certainly deserves further study, both quantitatively and qualitatively in a mixed-methods study of substantial scale in multiple locations across China. Likewise, the study of student attitudes toward the police reported here involved data collected from one large city in an ethnic autonomous region. Subsequent studies can build upon these findings to study youth in other autonomous provinces and in the coastal provinces in order to find out if the findings reported here can be shown to hold true in contemporary Chinese society.

Footnotes

Appendix

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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