Youth & Society

Unlike most other European countries, no self-report research in France has been published, so aside from available data or ethnographic and interview studies, little is known about the delinquent behavior of French youth and practically nothing about young people in the French countryside. In the research reported here, the authors administered a self-reported delinquency questionnaire to a sample of 387 lycée and collège students in the Poitou-Charentes region of central France. Employing indices used in the National Youth Survey, the authors sought to test the extent to which measures of social control and learning/differential association theories could be generalized to, and similarly help explain, the delinquency of boys and girls in rural France. Of the two theories investigated, social control measures either did not form reliable scales or were not significantly related to various offense scales, although measures of learning/differential association theory were strongly related to delinquency and about equally so for both boys and girls. The implications and limitations of the research are discussed.

The authors investigated the relationships of gender and gang membership to latent variables of psychosocial characteristics, drug use, delinquency, weapons possession, and fear within rural and urban school districts in Colorado. They compared 1,669 self-reported gang members to a sample of 1,742 nongang members in Grades 7 through 12. Gender was related more strongly to the latent variables than was place, which tended to favor the urban districts.

The present study documented the extent of gang involvement and gang membership in a sample of 602 homeless and runaway youth from four midwestern states. The study also compared gang members, gang-involved youth who were not members, and nongang youth on several dimensions including sociodemographic characteristics, family background, school experiences, street experiences and exposure, emotional problems, alcohol and drug use, and other delinquent and deviant behaviors. Findings indicated that a significant number of these youth were gang members (15.4% of the sample) or involved in gangs (32.2% of the sample). Youth gang members and gang-involved youth reported more family legal problems, had been suspended from school more, ran away at a younger age, used more alcohol and drugs, were exposed to more deviant peers, and attempted suicide more than did nongang youth. In addition, youth gang members reported less parental monitoring, more severe abuse, more street victimization, and more deviant subsistence strategies than did either gang-involved or noninvolved youth.

In this study, the authors explored young adults' autobiographical memories of their first consumption experiences with cigarettes using a form of life history. We collected and analyzed 276 first-person essays to discover the significance of conditions and factors associated with the first act of smoking. For the study's participants, the first-use experience was a symbolically significant and enduring life event. Participants were able to provide rich and detailed recollections about the contextual nature of the first smoking act and the influences and outcomes associated with the event. Suggestions for the development of intervention communication programs are offered as well as recommendations for future research.

This article examines the relationship between gender, physicality, and embodiment among a group of adolescent girls. The analysis is based on interviews with 24 girls who play ice hockey. In their accounts of the practice of hockey, respondents emphasize the importance of being aggressive, which they define as being powerful and sometimes fearless in use of the body. Whereas aggressiveness is a feature of both men's and women's hockey, the men's game is generally understood to be more physical and aggressive. Players understand that contrasts between men's and women's hockey arise out of both the material advantages that boys and men enjoy and the gendered ideologies that underlie the practice of sport. The article concludes with a consideration of the potential of hockey and other confrontational sports to challenge contemporary gender constructions and the limitations and possibilities of sport as an arena for change in gender ideologies and relations.