Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T07:33:04.187Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Using complementary methods to test whether marriage limits men's antisocial behavior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2013

Sara R. Jaffee ,
Caitlin McPherran Lombardi  and
Rebekah Levine Coley
Sara R. Jaffee*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania King's College London
Caitlin McPherran Lombardi
Affiliation:
Boston College
Rebekah Levine Coley
Affiliation:
Boston College
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Sara Jaffee, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3720 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104; E-mail: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Married men engage in significantly less antisocial behavior than unmarried men, but it is not clear whether this reflects a causal relationship. Instead, the relationship could reflect selection into marriage whereby the men who are most likely to marry (men in steady employment with high levels of education) are the least likely to engage in antisocial behavior. The relationship could also be the result of reverse causation, whereby high levels of antisocial behavior are a deterrent to marriage rather than the reverse. Both of these alternative processes are consistent with the possibility that some men have a genetically based proclivity to become married, known as an active genotype–environment correlation. Using four complementary methods, we tested the hypothesis that marriage limits men's antisocial behavior. These approaches have different strengths and weaknesses and collectively help to rule out alternative explanations, including active genotype–environment correlations, for a causal association between marriage and men's antisocial behavior. Data were drawn from the in-home interview sample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a large, longitudinal survey study of a nationally representative sample of adolescents in the United States. Lagged negative binomial and logistic regression and propensity score matching models (n = 2,250), fixed-effects models of within-individual change (n = 3,061), and random-effects models of sibling differences (n = 618) all showed that married men engaged in significantly less antisocial behavior than unmarried men. Our findings replicate results from other quasiexperimental studies of marriage and men's antisocial behavior and extend the results to a nationally representative sample of young adults in the United States.

Type
Special Section Articles
Information
Development and Psychopathology , Volume 25 , Issue 1: Gene–Environment Correlation in Developmental Psychopathology , February 2013 , pp. 65 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Beaver, K. M., Wright, J. P., DeLisi, M., & Vaughn, M. G. (2008). Desistance from delinquency: The marriage effect revisited and extended. Social Science Research, 37, 736–752.Google Scholar
Begg, M. D., & Parides, M. K. (2003). Separation of individual-level and cluster-level covariate effects in regression analysis of correlated data. Statistics in Medicine, 22, 2591–2602.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bersani, B., Laub, J., & Nieuwbeerta, P. (2009). Marriage and desistance from crime in the Netherlands: Do gender and socio-historical context matter? Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 25, 3–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blokland, A. A. J., & Nieuwbeerta, P. (2005). The effects of life circumstances on longitudinal trajectories of offending. Criminology, 43, 1203–1240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burt, S. A., Donnellan, M. B., Humbad, M. N., Hicks, B. M., McGue, M., & Iacono, W. G. (2010). Does marriage inhibit antisocial behavior: An examination of selection versus causation via a longitudinal twin design. Archives of General Psychiatry, 67, 1309–1315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cain, G. G. (1975). Regression and selection models to improve nonexperimental comparisons. In Bernett, C. A. & Lumsdiane, A. A. (Eds.), Evaluation and experiment (pp. 297–317). New York: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caliendo, M., & Kopeinig, S. (2008). Some practical guidance for the implementation of propensity score matching. Journal of Economic Surveys, 22, 31–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dehejia, R. H., & Wahba, S. (2002). Propensity score-matching methods for nonexperimental causal studies. Review of Economics and Statistics, 84, 151–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duncan, G. J., Magnuson, K. A., & Ludwig, J. (2004). The endogeneity problem in developmental studies. Research in Human Development, 1, 59–80.Google Scholar
Farrington, D. P. (1995). The development of offending and antisocial behaviour from childhood: Key findings from the Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 36, 929–964.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Horney, J., Osgood, D. W., & Marshall, I. H. (1995). Criminal careers in the short-term: Intra-individual variability in crime and its relation to local life circumstances. American Sociological Review, 60, 655–673.Google Scholar
Huebner, B. M., & Berg, M. T. (2011). Examining the sources of variation in risk for recidivism. Justice Quarterly, 28, 146–173.Google Scholar
Jaffee, S. R., & Price, T. S. (2007). Gene–environment correlations: A review of the evidence and implications for prevention of mental illness. Molecular Psychiatry, 12, 432–442.Google Scholar
Jaffee, S. R., Strait, L. B., & Odgers, C. L. (2012). From correlates to causes: Can quasi-experimental studies and statistical innovations bring us closer to identifying the causes of antisocial behavior? Psychological Bulletin, 138, 272–295.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, W., McGue, M., Krueger, R. F., & Bouchard, T. J. (2004). Marriage and personality: A genetic analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 285–294.Google Scholar
King, R. D., Massoglia, M., & Macmillan, R. (2007). The context of marriage and crime: Gender, the propensity to marry, and offending in early adulthood. Criminology, 45, 33–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krueger, R. F. (1999). Personality traits in late adolescence predict mental disorders in early adulthood: A prospective-epidemiological study. Journal of Personality, 67, 39–65.Google Scholar
Krueger, R. F., Moffitt, T. E., Caspi, A., Bleske, A., & Silva, P. A. (1998). Assortative mating for antisocial behavior: Developmental and methodological implications. Behavior Genetics, 28, 173–186.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Laub, J. H., Nagin, D. S., & Sampson, R. J. (1998). Trajectories of change in criminal offending: Good marriages and the desistance process. American Sociological Review, 63, 225–238.Google Scholar
Plomin, R., DeFries, J. C., & Loehlin, J. C. (1977). Genotype–environment interaction and correlation in the analysis of human behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 84, 309–322.Google Scholar
Porter, J. R., & Purser, C. W. (2010). Social disorganization, marriage, and reported crime: A spatial econometrics examination of family formation and criminal offending. Journal of Criminal Justice, 38, 942–950.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbaum, P. R., & Rubin, D. B. (1983). The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects. Biometrika, 70, 41–55.Google Scholar
Rubin, D. B. (1997). Estimating causal effects from large data sets using propensity scores. Annals of Internal Medicine, 127, 757–763.Google Scholar
Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sampson, R. J., Laub, J. H., & Wimer, C. (2006). Does marriage reduce crime? A counterfactual approach to within-individual causal effects. Criminology, 44, 465–510.Google Scholar
Theobald, D., & Farrington, D. P. (2009). Effects of getting married on offending: Results from a prospective longitudinal survey of males. European Journal of Criminology, 6, 496–516.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theobald, D., & Farrington, D. P. (2011). Why do the crime-reducing effects of marriage vary with age? British Journal of Criminology, 51, 136–158.Google Scholar
Warr, M. (1998). Life-course transitions and desistance from crime. Criminology, 36, 183–216.Google Scholar