Top–Down Eco-Systems of Social Bonding on Juvenile Violent Behavior: Gender Sensitive Analysis

The aim of this study is to test a multifaceted model across gender, consisting of bonding systems in relation to violent behaviors of youth and explaining the relationships among them. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health in 2006 was the source of data. This paper reports findings of a study examining gender-sensitive models with adolescent violent behavior, by testing multiple bonding systems in the adolescents’ environment simultaneously with use of (1) bi-variate statistical test, (2) t test, and (3) estimation of the structural equation modeling among all the concepts of violent behavior and bonding systems for the whole juvenile sample and separated sample of male and female juveniles. Both peer bonding and school bonding have an effect in decreasing violent behavior of both male and female youth. However, some different bonding systems were found to be effective only for a certain gender, community bonding for male youths and parental bonding for female youths. The satisfactory model fit was confirmed with whole, male-only, and female-only samples, along with new findings of several male-only and one female-only significant causal linkage among bonding systems.