Gender Roles and Delinquency

This paper uses path analytic procedures to compare merits of two different theories of the relationships between traditional sex roles and delinquency involvement. A self-report method was used with 1,002 students in grades eight through twelve of the public schools in a large Southeastern city. Two separate measures of delinquency were used, one for aggressive offenses and one for property offenses. Both the theory of opportunity and social controls and masculinity theory posit a positive relationship between traditional masculine role expectations and delinquency. Of the two, opportunity and social controls theory was found to have considerably more empirical support. However, masculine role expectations proved to be less powerful as a predictor of juveniles' opportunity and social controls than did traditional feminine role expectations. The findings varied somewhat for aggressive and property offenses. The implications of these findings for the current debate over the nature and magnitude of increases in female criminality are discussed.