Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This paper expands and builds on newer avenues in research on gender and general strain theory GST. I accomplish this by focusing on serious strains that are relevant for males and females, including externalizing and internalizing forms of negative emotions, and including multiple gendered deviant outcomes.
Using the Add Health dataset, I find strong support for the impact of serious strains on both types of negative emotions and different forms of deviance for males and females.
However, the experience of serious strain, emotionally and behaviorally, is gendered. Depressive symptoms are particularly important for all types of deviance by females. Including multiple types of deviant outcomes offers a fuller understanding of both similarities and differences by gender. These results support the utility of GST as a theory of deviance in general and support greater connections between GST, feminist theorizing, and the sociology of mental health.
Keywords: general strain theory, gender and deviance, gendered responses, serious strain. Over the last fifteen years, general strain theory GST has developed into one of the leading social psychological theories of crime with a fairly developed body of research Agnew, , , a. Agnew argues that various negative relations with others strain or stress lead to negative emotions and encourage some type of coping. That coping is more likely to be criminal when the strains are severe, seen as unjust, and are linked with anger Agnew, They further note that GST makes theoretical arguments similar to feminist accounts of female offending Chesney-Lind, by including a focus on how victimization and oppression may impact deviant behaviors.
In this paper, I build on recent literature in addressing these first three issues by focusing on serious strains that reflect gendered experiences suicide attempts by friends and family, violent victimization , including measures of both angry temperament and depressive symptoms as dependent variables and as mediators, and by including multiple gendered deviant outcomes including suicidal thoughts, weekly drinking, running away from home, and violence.
