Attributing Responsibility and Pondering Solutions: How Early Adolescents Conceptualize Violence As a Social Problem

Background and Purpose

Throughout adolescence, young people develop social, political, and moral identities, laying the groundwork for life-long orientations toward social responsibility and civic engagement (Wray Lake, et al., 2015). One factor relevant in understanding how young people develop these orientations is their attributions of responsibility, beliefs about who is responsible for addressing social problems (Crystal & DeBell, 2002). This concept has been associated directly with critical healthy development outcomes (Crystal & DeBell, 2002).

This paper explores how early adolescents think about social problems and attribute responsibility. We focus on one social problem many young people face: violence. Three out of five young people have been exposed to violence, with an estimated 46 million children impacted by violence in a year (Listenbee et al., 2012). We explore two questions:

1)                   To whom do early adolescents attribute responsibility for addressing the problem of violence?

2)                   What types of solutions do early adolescents propose when thinking about the problem of violence?

Methods:

Themes related to these questions emerged during a larger research project exploring how middle school students experience and perceive violence. Data are analyzed from a stratified sample of 128 essays students in Southeast Texas wrote as part of the “Do the Write Thing” (DtWT) Challenge. Through this initiative of the National Campaign to Stop Violence, participating students engage in classroom discussions about violence and write essays addressing three prompts:

• How has violence affected my life?
• What are the causes of violence?
• What can I do to reduce violence?

Thematic analysis was applied to the qualitative essay data. Each essay was coded individually by each of two researchers using codifying methods (Grbich, 2007). Once coding was complete, we grouped data extracts by codes and discussed our interpretations to reach agreement about meanings within the data.

Findings:

Responsibility. Thematic analyses reveal both inward and outward attribution of responsibility for preventing youth violence. Students who assign inward responsibility focus on personal responsibility in stopping localized incidents of violence. Outward attributions of responsibility range from fellow young people, bystanders, and locally-accessible adults to government officials and higher powers. An additional thematic category of particular interest is the emergence of a global attribution of responsibility to a vague and undefined “we”.

Solutions. Despite a prompt directly querying solutions to reducing violence, a large number of respondents offer no solution. Of those discussing solutions, proposed solutions are varied. These range from local individual acts such as standing up for victims of violence, empathizing with victims, and avoiding violent solutions to broader, collective solutions, such as education, community-level collaboration, and government involvement.

Conclusions and Implications: 

These qualitative findings offer greater insight than prior research into ways that early adolescents think about social problems. While these young people think broadly about violence and ways to tackle this problem, a substantial degree of helplessness emerged. Implications for future research and practice with young people to better support their development of social responsibility and to respond to their feelings of helplessness in reaction to societal challenges will be presented.