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This study explores gender differences in the impact of risk and protective factors on adolescent deviant behavior. With a longitudinal design and reports from actual friends, regression analyses indicate that both family and school factors reduced adolescent delinquency and substance use and protected adolescents against the impact of having deviant friends, though school factors were more consistently protective than family factors. The sources of protection differed by gender for each type of deviance.

This longitudinal study used a national probability sample of adolescents to examine whether attachments to the family and school reduced five forms of adolescent deviance: cigarette smoking, alcohol use, marijuana use, delinquency, and violent behavior. The authors assessed whether these factors reduced the overall frequency, prevalence, and intensity of each problem behavior. The study also examined the power of these attachments to reduce deviance among adolescents who were differentiated in terms of gender, ethnicity, and their community’s level of economic deprivation. Overall, adolescent attachments to family and school tended to reduce the overall frequency, prevalence, and intensity of deviant involvement, regardless of community context, gender, or ethnic group. Parental reports of attachment to the adolescent, compared with adolescent reports of connection to the family, were the stronger predictors of lower levels of deviance. Attachment to school predicted lower levels of initiation of deviant behavior but did not predict the intensity of deviance.

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Are people quick to adopt status beliefs about a social difference that lead them to treat others unequally? In a test of status construction theory, two experiments show that men and women form equally strong status beliefs from only two encounters with others. Men act powerfully on these new beliefs in their next encounters with others but women do not, possibly because women face greater social risks for acting on ambiguous status advantages. Women are just as likely as men, however, to treat someone unequally on the basis of an established status distinction. This suggests that men are first movers in the emergence of status distinctions, but women eventually adopt the distinctions as well. Our results show that people readily transform social differences into status distinctions-distinctions that act as formidable forces of inequality.