Spousal Violence and Social Rules: An Examination of Adolescents' Reasoning Patterns

Introduction. The primary goal of this study was to examine how social rules influence the reasoning patterns among adolescents who approve spousal violence. Social cognitive domain theory posits that there are three domains in which adolescents reason about violence (i.e., moral, social conventional, and personal), and that they refer to justifications within these three domains and balance among them when judging complex situations involving physical harm between individuals. There are a paucity of studies that examine how social norms/ rules influence adolescents’ judgments and justifications about violence. Toward that end, this study examined the various ways social rules influence the reasoning process of Arab and Jewish adolescents who condone spousal violence.

Method. The sample of adolescents was drawn from central and northern Israel and consisted of 2324 Arab and Jewish students (grades 7 – 11).  A quasi-experimental between subject design was used, where the students in each grade were randomly assigned to spousal violence scenarios. The scenario involved a situation where a wife called her husband and his family really bad names and the husband responded by punching her in the face. The questionnaire prompted students to make judgments about violence between a husband and his wife, to select rationalizations for these judgments, and then to make an evaluation on whether the husband and wife violated rules of people, family, religion, and country. The data for this study included only adolescent who approved spousal violence (n = 508) and was analyzed by means of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using SPSS AMOS software.

Results. Our findings suggest that 29.8% of Arab respondents and 8.9% Jewish respondents approved of violence. Arab respondents used significantly more moral and social conventional reasoning in their approval. SEM analyses showed that the relationship between religiosity and social conventional and personal reasoning, and between grade level and social conventional and personal reasoning were mediated by social rules about the wife (eg., wife violating a rule against country). Similarly, the relationship between religiosity and social conventional reasoning, and between grade level and social conventional reasoning, were mediated by social rules about the husband (eg., husband violated a rule against religion). For Arab respondents, there was an indirect relationship between grade level and the belief that the wife violated a social rule, whereas the opposite was true for Jewish respondents. 

Discussion. Our findings show that for social cognitive domain studies, it is important to examine judgments, types of reasoning, as well as the social rules that mediate this process. Implications for social cognitive domain theory and spousal violence are discussed.