Adaptations to Strain among Adolescents involved in Violent Events.

General Strain Theory (GST) explores negative relationships one is involved in and the responses they produce (Agnew, 1992). GST assumes that negative affect from these relationships results in pressure for negative behavior, and thus can result in delinquent acts, including crime and violence. By applying the theory to a qualitative dataset of over 400 young, violent men from the New York City Youth Violence Study (NYCYVS) (as previously described by Wilkinson, 2003), this paper will look at how individuals' reported strain and ways of adapting to strain are related to respective involvement in violent events. The life history interviews of urban minority crime-involved youth revealed multiple sources of strain across multiple life and relationship domains. Preliminary analyses have shown emotionally-adaptive adolescents to be less violent than behaviorally-adaptive adolescents. Also noted is the lack of cognitive adaptation to strain among violent youth. While all adolescents from the initial subsample had experienced what Agnew and most others would agree to be strain, the interviewees did not seem especially distressed by their pasts as a whole. Continued analyses of these data will provide a nuanced picture of the storylines of violent male youth. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]