Chaneika Barber
Virginia Commonwealth University
Assignment 3
Antisocial Behavior Introduction
Antisocial behavior is defined as acting in a manner that generates harassment or distress to one or more individual or resisting condemning to social norms (Mooney & Young, 2006). According to Mooney & Young (2006), people understand antisocial behavior through different factors such as context, location, time, and quality of life expectations (Mooney & Young, 2006). The understanding of anti-social response can be based on an individual’s perception which can include a wide range of behaviors such as graffiti, substance abuse, drugs use, noisy neighbors, gangs, vandalism, etc. Antisocial behavior refers to the inability of a person who lacks empathy, which indicates the individual fails to understand the feelings of others (Mooney & Young, 2006). According to Millie (2007), antisocial behavior deteriorates the nature of life through the infliction of fear and victimization. Therefore, the quality of life weakens, and the people in the community become vulnerable to those antisocial behaviors. Siennick, Staff, Osgood, Schulenberg, Bachman, & VanEseltine (2014) advances the existing research by focusing on the impacts of partnership and cohabitation on antisocial behavior with unique factors that may modify cohabitation’s meaning, namely marriage plans, and historical time.
Siennick et al. Study
Siennick et al. (2014) “sought to examine the impact of young adult transitions into marriage and cohabitation based on criminal acts and substance use, and whether those impacts have changed since 1970” (Siennick et al., 2014, p. 736). Siennick et al. (2014) proposed several hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: “The relative effects of cohabitation and marriage depends on the extent to which the mechanism behind the marriage effect apply to cohabitation” (Siennick et al., 2014, p. 737).
Hypothesis 2: “If these mechanisms do apply to cohabitation, they may be most likely to apply under two circumstances: when the cohabiters are engaged or among recent cohorts for whom coexistence is normative” (Siennick et al., 2014, p. 737).
Method
The study conducted by Siennick et al. (2014) examined the relationship between antisocial behavior, marriage, and cohabitation among 30 cohorts of young adults from the Monitoring the Future (MTF) study. Siennick et al. (2014) utilized data from MTF, a continuing study that “annually surveys a sample of high school seniors and then longitudinally follows a subset of each cohort into adulthood by using mailed questionnaires” (Siennick et al., 2014, p. 740). The participants were randomly sampled from approximately 135 high schools a year, which was selected by probability proportionate “based on their size from a sample of geographic areas” (Siennick et al., 2014, p. 740).
“The biennial follow-up survey started one year after high school for one random half of each cohort and two years after high school for the remaining half of the gro...
