Race, Ethnicity, and Deviance

Sociological Forum, Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2002 ( C 2002)

Race, Ethnicity, and Deviance: A Study of Asian and Non-Asian Adolescents in America1
Sung Joon Jang2

This study shows that Asian American adolescents commit less deviance in the form of school misbehavior than white, black, Hispanic, or Native American adolescents. Social control and social learning theories receive support as the observed differences are explained primarily by race/ethnic differences in family backgrounds and school bonding. These variables’ explanatory ability tends to be invariant across four regional groups of Asian Americans. This study applies OLS regression to self-reported data from a nationally representative sample.
KEY WORDS: Asian American; adolescent deviance; social control; social learning; race/ ethnicity; juvenile delinquency.

INTRODUCTION In the midst of the ongoing debate over the arbitrariness of race categorization and changes in the social conception and significance of race and ethnicity (Alba, 1990; Barringer et al., 1993; Lieberson and Waters, 1988; Peterson and Hagan, 1984; Wilson, 1980), sociological criminologists have regarded race/ethnicity as a major demographic correlate of deviance and crime. While early self-report studies argued that racial/ethnic differences in crime observed in official data primarily reflect bias in the justice system against racial/ethnic minorities (e.g., Chambliss and Nagasawa,
1 An

earlier version of this paper was presented at the 12th International Congress on Criminology of the International Society for Criminology, Seoul, Korea, August, 1998. 2 Department of Sociology, Louisiana State University, 126 Stubbs Hall, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803; e-mail: [e-mail]. 647
0884-8971/02/1200-0647/0
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2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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1969), victimization studies, as well as later self-report studies, find that the system-bias factor cannot explain most of the observed differences (Hindelang et

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