Liquor Is Quicker

• Author: Michael Capece,Helena Alden,Lonn Lanza-Kaduce
• Published date: 01 June 2006
• Date: 01 June 2006
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0887403405279934
• Subject Matter: Articles

10.1177/0887403405279934Criminal Justice Policy ReviewLanza-Kaduce et al. / Gender and Social Learning

Liquor Is Quicker

Gender and Social Learning

Among College Students

Lonn Lanza-Kaduce

University of Florida

Michael Capece

Valdosta State University

Helena Alden

University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point

Akers’s Social Structure–Social Learning Theory (SS-SL) has recently been criticized

for dealing with social structural factors as exogenous variables rather than integrating

them into propositions that specify the learning processes better. For example, Morash

has argued that SS-SL has largely ignored the ways in which gender structures institu-

tions, interactions, and behaviors and takes Akers to task for ignoring feminist theories.

This research uses Core Alcohol and Drug Survey data from a subsample of White

unmarried college students from eight diverse campuses throughout the United States to

examine howconflict structured by gender affects differences in the use of alcohol before

sex. The research specifically examines Akers’sclaim that social learning variables (in

this case, anticipated reward and risk of harm) will substantially mediate the effects of

structural variables rather than modulate or moderate them. The policy implications of

the research are discussed.

Keywords: Social Structure–Social Learning Theory; feminism; drinking and sex

Candy

Is dandy

But liquor

Is quicker

—Ogden Nash (1931/1992)

Social Structure–Social Learning Theory

and Feminism

Social Structure–Social Learning Theory (SS-SL) represents Akers’s (1998)

recent effort to integrate social structural elements with the social learning process that

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Criminal Justice

Policy Review

Volume 17 Number 2

June 2006 127-143

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he has specified during the pastthree decades (Akers, 1973, 1977, 1985, 1994; Akers,

Krohn, Lanza-Kaduce, & Radosevich, 1979; Burgess & Akers, 1966). His new gen-

eral theory of crime and deviance was the subject of a symposium in which several

critics raised questions about the integration. Krohn (1999), for example, argued that

Akers seemed “content to add social structural dimensions as exogenous variables”

(p. 473) rather than provide propositions relating social structure to the social learning

process. Morash (1999) more specifically faulted SS-SL for failing to give adequate

attention to gender and for ignoring theories and research on gender and crime or

deviance.

Akers (1999) responded to Morash’s criticism by explicitly including gender in his

position that “the social learning process . . . mediate[s] a substantial portion of the

relationship between most structural variables” and behavior (Akers, 1998, p. 340;

also cited in Akers, 1999, p. 485). His position is that variables representing the social

learning process (differential association, personal definitions, differential reinforce-

ment and punishment contingencies, and imitation and modeling) will mediate rather

than moderate or modulate the effects of social structure. Evidence of a moderating or

modulating effect could be discerned by statistical interactions between structural

variables, such as gender, and social learning variables (Baron & Kenny, 1986). The

expectation of mediation rather than statistical interaction isone he and his colleagues

have long held (Krohn, Lanza-Kaduce, & Akers, 1984).

Akers’s response, however, is unlikely to silence those who insist that researchers

“must begin to do more than consider gender as a variable. ...Wemust theorize gen-

der” (Chesney-Lind & Faith, 2001, p. 290). One of the specific foci of Chesney-Lind

and Faith’s(2001) argumentis how sexual expression is sanctioned to regulate sexual-

ity.Part of the challenge includes taking “feminist insights about gender and applying

them to male behavior” (p. 294).

Gender and Alcohol Use and Sex

This research examines Akers’smediation hypothesis in a context that incorporates

structural variables that are suggested by feminist theory. The dependent variable—

drinking before sexual intercourse among unmarried White heterosexual college

students—is unusual in that it is neither clearly criminal nor deviant. It does, however,

intersect two behaviors that implicate how people “do gender” or behave in gendered

ways (Miller, 2000, p. 28). Inasmuch as Akers’s general theory, in the tradition of

Sutherland’s (1947) exposition of differential association, purports to explain all

behaviors (i.e., conforming and nonconforming ones), the choice of the dependent

variable does not detract from scrutinizing the theoretical linkages between social

structure and social learning.

Although Akers (1997, 1998, chap. 4) has insisted that social learning theory is not

a theory of cultural deviance (which can only explain group differences), he readily

accepts that culture is important to the learning process.

128 Criminal Justice Policy Review