Acceptability of dating violence among late adolescents: the role of sports participation, competitive attitudes, and selected dynamics of relationship violence

Adolescence, March 22, 2008 by Michael J. Merten

RESULTS

Descriptive Statistics

The sample was predominantly White (91%); other ethnicities included African American (5%), Asian American (2%), and Hispanic (2%). Class standing consisted of Freshmen (19%), Sophomores (21%), Juniors (21%), and Seniors (39%). In addition, approximately one-third of both males and females report their high school graduating class as having 100 students or less. In regard to current relationship status among males, 42% indicated they were not currently in a dating or marital relationship, 18% were in a current relationship of between one month and one year in length, 17% were in a current relationship of 1-2 years duration, 20% were in a current relationship of 2-5 years duration, and 3% of the sample were in a current relationship of over 5 years duration. For females, 36% indicated they were not currently in a dating or marital relationship, 25% were in a current relationship between one month and one year in length, 20% were in a current relationship of 1-2 years duration, 15% were in a current relationship of 2-5 years duration, and 4% of the sample were in a current relationship of over 5 years duration (see Table 1).

Table 2 displays athletic characteristics of the participants in the current study. A high number of respondents reported involvement in high school and college sports activities. Only 8% of males and 15% of females state that they have never participated in sports. The majority of the sample reported continued involvement, with 46% of the males and 25% of the females involved in college intramural sports, and 14% of the males and 9% of the females being current participants in Division I college athletics. For those who reported any sports participation, team-only was the preferred sport for 61% of the males and 51% of the females. The number of sports and the type of sport (e.g., team, individual, football, soccer) were not significantly correlated with the acceptability of dating violence among men and women in this study.

Men's and women's mean scores for competitiveness, need to win, and acceptability of violence are shown in Table 3. Mean competitiveness scores for men (M = 3.96, SD = .79) are higher than those for women (M = 3.44, SD = .83) (t = 8.03, p < .001). Mean need to win scores for men (3.58, SD = .82) are also higher than mean scores for women (M = 3.25, SD = .84) (t = 4.98,p < .001). Scores were averaged across the 18 dating vignettes to produce acceptability of violence means. Table 3 shows that males (M = 2.24, SD = .87) are more accepting of violence than are females (M = 2.01, SD = .81) (t = 3.50, p < .001).

Multi-level random intercept regression analyses were run to examine the independent effects of respondent and case characteristics on the acceptability of violence in dating relationships (Table 4). Due to the complex nature of the research design, which includes a multilevel design (vignettes nested within individuals), this study uses the SAC PROC MIXED procedure for multi-level modeling. This approach allows us to examine the unique influence of both case-level variables and respondent-level variables. The between and within individual variances of acceptability of dating violence were 0.56 and 1.55, respectively. We then estimated several nested models to test hypotheses.