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A Social Interactionist Approach to the Victim-Offender Overlap

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Abstract

Objectives

A social interactionist perspective suggests that violent offenders are frequently victims of violence because of the way they behave, and the way third parties behave during verbal disputes that lead to escalation. We examine to what extent violent offenders are more likely to be victimized because they tend to engage in provocative actions, are less likely to engage in remedial actions, and more likely to be intoxicated, and because third-parties have a greater tendency to encourage aggressive behaviors during disputes involving offenders.

Methods

Analyses are based on an original situational-level survey of male inmates and men in the community about characteristics of their verbal and violent interpersonal disputes. We examined the extent to which various dispute-related behaviors and third-party actions mediated the relationship between offending and two study outcomes: whether the dispute became violent and whether the antagonist was victimized.

Results

Using two measures of violent offender status, we find that violent actors are more likely to engage in verbal aggression during disputes, are less likely to engage in remedial actions, and are more likely to be intoxicated. Third parties are more likely to be present during the disputes of offenders and they tend to encourage escalation. Combined, these situational processes mediate a substantial portion of the relationship between offending and violent victimization.

Conclusions

The findings indicate the victim-offender overlap is partly due to the behaviors of offenders and third parties during disputes that significantly increase the risk of conflict escalation.

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Notes

  1. State rules did not permit financial incentives for inmates (although we could serve them refreshments).

  2. We are not aware of other studies that have utilized a nomination or network method involving inmates and their contacts in the community to study conflicts. However, studies in the health sciences have used similar nomination methods to examine outcomes in hard-to-reach populations, and to examine risky behaviors that tend to be occur infrequently in the general population. For instance, this method has been used to study gay men with HIV (see, Beyrer et al. 2012; Faugier and Sargeant 1997). An advantage of this approach is that it establishes trust between the potential respondent and the researcher (see Faugier and Sargeant 1997). This trust can be difficult to establish when the survey involves sensitive topics. Presumably, the community members were more willing to participate in our project since they had been nominated by an acquaintance.

  3. An alternative method would have been to use vignettes. We preferred to study actual actions during real conflicts—albeit self-reported—rather than hypothetical actions during imagined conflicts. Another alternative method is to gather data from the systematic observation of conflicts (e.g., Graham and Wells 2001). However, with such a design it is difficult to know whom said what to whom during conflicts to assess verbal actions that result in escalation.

  4. For both groups, a small fraction of the violent conflicts (< 7%) occurred 10 or more years ago. Just over 75% of the conflicts occurred in the previous 5 years.

  5. The two measures of violent offending are correlated at .49 (p < .01), suggesting they capture similar information about the violent traits of the respondents’ antagonists. As such, the two measures exhibit “trait convergence” and, therefore, sufficient convergent validity based on conventional standards (Bagozzi and Yi 1993). This means they assess a similar underling trait of the antagonist—their status as a violent person. However, the reputation variable is an impression of the antagonist’s violent or aggressive tendency, regardless of whether they have been arrested, whereas the violent arrest measure captures their commission of illegal violent behavior regardless of their reputation. The latter is similar in many respects to measures used in self-report surveys of youth e.g., Berg and Loeber 2011; Ousey et al. 2011). We incorporate both measures to develop convergent assessments of the violent offender construct to insure concordance (see, Bagozzi and Yi 1993). We thus expect the effects of each measure to be similar.

  6. A small number of respondents did not provide answers to a small fraction of survey questions about incident-related factors. These item non-responses were treated as missing data. We used list-wise deletion to eliminate the incidents from the sample. Specifically, 15 incidents were dropped because of missing data on the de-escalation variable. Most of this missing data originated from the “antagonist gender” survey item. An additional eighteen incidents were omitted from the antagonist victimization models because of missing data on the dependent variable. Missing data account for a combined loss of 68 incidents from the models where victimization is the dependent variable, and 60 incidents in the models examining whether the incident was violent.

  7. Respondents had the option to report “don’t know” (DK) for several of the variables in which the information might have been difficult to discern. In approximately 5% of the disputes, respondents did not know whether antagonists leveled threats, and in approximately 4 percent they reported not knowing if antagonists insulted them. Also, in 4.6% percent of incidents they reported not knowing if antagonists engaged in de-escalation, in 4.7% if they excused/justified, and in 4% of incidents if they apologized. In addition, respondents indicated that they could not recall the behaviors of third parties in 3.6% of incidents. Rather than treat the cases with DK responses as missing since the responses technically are not missing information about the dispute, we recoded them as 0 or as “no” responses. We expected that the actions of antagonists and third parties (or lack thereof) would have a meaningful impact on the outcome of disputes, particularly whether the respondents used violence, if the respondent could adequately recall how the other parties behaved. Therefore, we assumed that not knowing whether an antagonist engaged in a behavior (e.g., threats) was similar to knowing that an antagonist did not engage in a behavior. The same is true of third-party presence. However, supplemental regression analyses revealed that the estimates were virtually the same whether we code the DK category as yes (or 1) rather than no responses (available upon request). For the alcohol measure, however, a larger percentage of cases received DK responses likely due to the ambiguity that surrounds the question of whether another party was drinking. For this reason, we created a separate variable that recorded DK responses to the drinking measure. It was included in the main analysis.

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Funding

The funding for this study was provided by the National Institute of Justice, US Department of Justice (Grant No. #2012-91288-PA-IJ) to the study authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Iowa, W126 Seashore Hall, Iowa City, IA, 52242, USA

    Mark T. Berg

  2. Department of Sociology and Criminology, Pennsylvania State University, 900 Oswald Tower, State College, PA, USA

    Richard Felson

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  1. Mark T. Berg
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  2. Richard Felson
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Correspondence to Mark T. Berg.

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Berg, M.T., Felson, R. A Social Interactionist Approach to the Victim-Offender Overlap. J Quant Criminol 36, 153–181 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-019-09418-9

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