Antisocial Attitudes

Abstract

The Favorable Attitudes Toward Antisocial Behavior Scale is an empirically validated psychometric instrument designed to assess cognitive endorsements, moral evaluations, and personal tolerances of deviant, delinquent, and aggressive behaviors among children and adolescents. Originally embedded within the Student Survey of Risk and Protective Factors and the Communities That Care (CTC) Youth Survey developed by the Social Development Research Group (SDRG) at the University of Washington, this 5-item self-report measure operationalizes individual-level risk within contemporary developmental criminology and prevention science. Respondents evaluate the perceived moral wrongness of five distinct transgressive acts—including weapon carrying at school, property theft, initiating physical altercations, severe interpersonal violence, and unexcused school truancy—on a 4-point response continuum anchored from Very wrong to Not wrong at all. Extensive national and cross-national psychometric evaluations have demonstrated that the scale exhibits robust unidimensional construct validity, strong internal consistency (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently ranging between α = .78 and .86 across normative middle and high school cohorts), and invariant measurement properties across diverse demographic, racial, and socioeconomic strata. Crucially, the measure possesses exceptional predictive validity: elevations in favorable attitudes toward antisocial behavior during early adolescence reliably forecast subsequent involvement in violent delinquency, juvenile justice contact, substance use initiation, and persistent academic disengagement in late adolescence and emerging adulthood. This article provides a comprehensive academic review of the scale’s psychometric architecture, underlying theoretical frameworks (notably the Social Development Model and Social Learning Theory), structural equation modeling evidence, scoring conventions, diagnostic and evaluative applications in community prevention systems, and full administration protocols.

Keywords

Antisocial attitudes, juvenile delinquency, risk factors, Communities That Care, Social Development Model, adolescent violence, peer aggression, moral disengagement, conduct problems, psychometrics, prevention science.

Authors

The Favorable Attitudes Toward Antisocial Behavior Scale was formulated, validated, and standardized by principal investigators and research scientists at the Social Development Research Group (SDRG), a premier research center within the School of Social Work at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, United States.

• J. David Hawkins, Ph.D. – Emeritus Professor of Social Work; Founding Director of the Social Development Research Group, School of Social Work, University of Washington. Dr. Hawkins is a pioneer in developmental criminology, co-developer of the Social Development Model, and architect of the Communities That Care prevention operating system.
• Richard F. Catalano, Ph.D. – Emeritus Professor of Social Work; Co-Founder of the Social Development Research Group, School of Social Work, University of Washington. Dr. Catalano has authored foundational longitudinal research on etiology, adolescent substance abuse, delinquency prevention, and positive youth development.
• Michael W. Arthur, Ph.D. – Research Associate Professor (Retired), Social Development Research Group, University of Washington; specialist in community-based epidemiology, psychometric measurement of risk and protective factors, and prevention methodology.

Institutional Contact & Archive:
Social Development Research Group
School of Social Work, University of Washington
9725 3rd Ave. NE, Suite 401, Seattle, WA 98115-2024, USA
Website: http://depts.washington.edu/sdrg/

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Favorable Attitudes Toward Antisocial Behavior Scale is to provide a brief, methodologically rigorous, and developmentally sensitive index of an adolescent’s internal moral standards and permissive cognitive appraisals regarding delinquent acts. In developmental psychopathology and prevention science, individual beliefs and values function as proximate determinants of behavior. When youth perceive rule-breaking, interpersonal violence, property destruction, or systemic defiance as normative or minimally blameworthy, internal social control mechanisms are compromised, substantially decreasing the subjective cost of engaging in deviant activities. Quantifying these internal cognitive structures is therefore essential for early identification, intervention design, and community-wide risk profiling.

In clinical, educational, and public health settings, the scale is deployed to achieve multiple distinct objectives:

• Epidemiological Surveillance and Needs Assessment: The subscale is universally administered within school districts participating in state-wide and national Youth Risk and Protective Factor surveys (such as the CSAP Student Survey and CTC assessments). It enables public health epidemiologists, municipal agencies, and school boards to benchmark the prevalence of delinquent attitudes across 6th through 12th-grade student populations, identifying specific grades, demographic groups, or geographical catchment areas experiencing heightened vulnerability.
• Targeted Prevention and Clinical Screening: In multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS), school counselors and adolescent clinical psychologists utilize the scale to identify youth demonstrating elevated individual risk. Endorsement of permissive beliefs toward weapon possession or physical assault serves as an actionable screening indicator for targeted secondary interventions, such as cognitive-behavioral anger management, moral reasoning training, or restorative justice programming.
• Program Evaluation and Outcome Monitoring: The scale functions as a core outcome metric in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-experimental evaluations of evidence-based delinquency prevention programs (e.g., Life Skills Training, Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies [PATHS], and Guiding Good Choices). Because cognitive shifts frequently precede behavioral change, reductions in favorable antisocial attitudes provide critical early evidence of intervention efficacy prior to observable decreases in criminal offense or school suspension rates.

Psychological Construct

The construct captured by this instrument is individual favorable attitudes toward antisocial behavior, conceptualized as an evaluative, cognitive predisposition reflecting low moral condemnation, neutral affective disapproval, or outright rationalization of behavior that violates established societal laws, institutional rules, or the physical safety and property rights of others. Rather than assessing overt behavioral enactment (i.e., whether the youth has personally committed a crime), this construct isolates the internal normative framework through which an adolescent appraises such actions when performed by their peer reference group (“someone your age”).

Within contemporary psychometrics, this construct encompasses three primary conceptual domains:

• Severe and Lethal Weapon-Related Violence: Evaluated by item 1 (bringing a handgun to school). Carrying a concealed firearm within an educational institution represents an extreme manifestation of antisocial orientation. It taps into profound norm neutralization, hyper-defensive weaponization, or disregard for catastrophic collective risk. Endorsing this behavior as “not wrong” reflects a critical breakdown of institutional bonding and conventional safety norms.
• Predatory Interpersonal Aggression and Fighting: Evaluated by items 3 and 4 (picking a fight with someone; attacking someone with intent to inflict serious bodily injury). These items probe the endorsement of instrumental and reactive aggression. Favorable appraisal of unprovoked physical conflict indicates deficits in empathy, positive attributional styles, and impulse regulation, reflecting beliefs that interpersonal dominance through physical violence is acceptable or socially adaptive.
• Property Crime and Institutional Defiance: Evaluated by items 2 and 5 (stealing property valued over $5; intentional, deceptive school truancy). These items target common juvenile status and covert delinquency offenses. Item 2 measures disregard for property rights and the breakdown of basic honesty norms, while item 5 assesses covert institutional evasion, deceit toward parental figures, and active detachment from the conventional expectations of the educational system.

By encompassing covert delinquency (theft, truancy), overt conflict (fighting), and lethal threat potential (weapons, severe bodily harm), the construct represents a unified spectrum of moral disinhibition. High scores indicate a generalized erosion of internal regulatory constraints against antisocial behavior.

Theoretical Framework

The scale is grounded primarily in the Social Development Model (SDM), formulated by J. David Hawkins and Richard F. Catalano. The SDM represents an overarching synthesis of three foundational criminological paradigms: Hirschi’s Social Control Theory, Akers’s Social Learning Theory, and Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory.

According to the SDM, human development is shaped through reciprocal interactions across key social units: family, school, peers, and community. The model posits that individuals develop behavioral patterns along either a prosocial or antisocial developmental pathway through a sequence of structural interactions:

1. Opportunities for Involvement: Adolescents are exposed to opportunities for interaction and skill acquisition within prosocial or antisocial social environments.
2. Interaction and Reinforcement: Active participation leads to reinforcement (rewards or sanctions) from significant others (parents, teachers, peers).
3. Social Bonding: Consistent positive reinforcement fosters attachment (affective bonds) and commitment (investment in conventional goals), yielding a strong “social bond.”
4. Belief Systems and Attitudes: The social bond leads the individual to internalize the behavioral standards and moral values of the socializing unit. When bonds to conventional institutions are weak, or when primary bonds are formed with delinquent peers, youth fail to internalize prosocial norms and instead adopt favorable attitudes toward antisocial behavior.

Under the SDM, favorable antisocial attitudes act as the direct, proximate cognitive precursor to delinquent behavior. An adolescent who has internalized the belief that violence, theft, and truancy are acceptable lacks the internal controls necessary to resist delinquent opportunities. This formulation also interfaces with Bandura’s theory of Moral Disengagement and Sykes and Matza’s classical Techniques of Neutralization, which argue that deviant behavior is facilitated when actors cognitively reframe transgressions to neutralize guilt, blame the victim, or trivialize harm.

Validity

The construct, convergent, criterion-related, and predictive validity of the Favorable Attitudes Toward Antisocial Behavior Scale have been established through large-scale longitudinal investigations conducted by the Social Development Research Group, the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), and independent replication consortia across North America, Europe, Australia, and South America.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) across diverse multi-state adolescent samples (exceeding N = 150,000 students across grades 6, 8, 10, and 12) consistently indicate that the 5 items load strongly onto a single, coherent latent dimension. Factor loadings for all individual items routinely exceed λ = .65, with the interpersonal violence items (attacking someone to hurt them, picking fights) demonstrating loadings between λ = .74 and .84. Fit indices consistently satisfy stringent contemporary thresholds: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) > .97, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) > .96, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) < .05.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

The scale demonstrates robust convergent validity against closely allied theoretical constructs:

• Peer Delinquency: Exhibits strong positive correlations (r = .52 to .64, p < .001) with scales measuring peer antisocial behavior, such as association with delinquent companions and peer approval of drug use.
• Prosocial School Bonding: Displays moderate-to-strong negative correlations (r = -.40 to -.55, p < .001) with measures of school commitment, academic attachment, and perceived teacher rewards for conventional behavior.
• Parental Supervision: Demonstrates consistent inverse associations (r = -.35 to -.45, p < .001) with positive parental monitoring, consistent disciplinary practices, and family cohesion.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

In prospective longitudinal studies tracking cohorts from grade 6 through emerging adulthood (e.g., the Seattle Social Development Project and the CTC Youth Development Study), baseline scores on the Favorable Attitudes Toward Antisocial Behavior Scale significantly predict future real-world delinquent outcomes. After controlling for demographic characteristics, socioeconomic background, and prior baseline infractions, an elevation of one standard deviation on this scale is associated with:

• An approximate 2.4-fold increase in the odds of violent physical assault (odds ratio [OR] range: 2.1 – 2.8) measured two to three years post-assessment.
• A 2.1-fold increase in the odds of weapon carrying on school premises.
• Substantially elevated relative risks for school suspension, police contact, juvenile arrest, and early-onset illicit drug use.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Favorable Attitudes Toward Antisocial Behavior Scale has been documented extensively across demographic subgroups, educational contexts, and linguistic translations.

Internal Consistency

Estimates of internal consistency reliability consistently demonstrate high precision for a 5-item brief metric:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): In normative school-based epidemiological samples, α estimates routinely range between .78 and .86. For instance, in the nationwide CTC psychometric validation study published by Arthur et al. (2002), the scale demonstrated an overall alpha of α = .81 among 6th-grade students, α = .83 among 8th-grade students, and α = .85 among 10th-grade students, highlighting increased cognitive-moral consolidation as adolescents mature.
• McDonald’s Omega (ω): Composite reliability coefficients calculated via structural equation models yield ω values spanning .82 to .87, confirming that the scale maintains high internal consistency without relying on the assumption of tau-equivalence.
• Mean Inter-Item Correlation: Inter-item correlations fall stably between r = .42 and .56, within the psychometrically optimal range indicating solid conceptual coherence without excessive item redundancy.

Test-Retest Stability

In longitudinal and panel cohorts, test-retest reliability across short-term intervals (2 to 4 weeks) yields intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) and Pearson correlation coefficients exceeding r = .78, indicating temporal stability. Over longer developmental horizons (1 to 2 years), moderate stability coefficients (r = .45 to .58) are observed, reflecting both developmental trait persistence and sensitivity to environmental shifts, peer socialization influences, and intervention effects.

Factor Analysis

Psychometric evaluations across multiple large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets support an invariant, unidimensional factor structure. Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA) utilizing principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood estimation consistently identify a single dominant eigenvalue accounting for over 52% to 62% of the total variance across items, with no secondary factor achieving an eigenvalue above 0.72 (scree plot analysis shows a distinct single-factor elbow).

In Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), the baseline single-factor model yields exceptional fit statistics across varied samples. Representative structural findings derived from large-scale state-wide adolescent cohorts (e.g., Arthur et al., 2002; Hawkins et al., 2009) are summarized below:

• Model Fit Indices:
  • χ² / df ratio: 2.14 – 3.82 (indicating excellent absolute fit in large-sample contexts where χ² is hyper-sensitive).
  • Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .982 – .991
  • Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .974 – .986
  • Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .038 (90% CI [.031, .046])
  • Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .024
• Standardized Factor Loadings (λ):
  • Item 1 (Handgun to school): λ = .68 – .74
  • Item 2 (Steal > $5): λ = .69 – .76
  • Item 3 (Pick a fight): λ = .76 – .82
  • Item 4 (Attack to seriously hurt): λ = .81 – .87
  • Item 5 (Truancy / stay away all day): λ = .62 – .70

Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA) confirms strict measurement invariance (configural, metric, and scalar invariance) across genders (male vs. female), grade levels (grades 6 through 12), and major racial/ethnic categories (White, African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander). This structural invariance ensures that observed group differences in mean scores reflect true variations in latent antisocial attitudes rather than differential item functioning (DIF) or measurement bias.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Favorable Attitudes Toward Antisocial Behavior Scale (Subscale of the Communities That Care Youth Survey / Student Survey of Risk and Protective Factors)
• Construct Assessed: Individual-level moral endorsement, cognitive acceptability, and permissive attitudes toward adolescent delinquent behaviors and violence.
• Respondent Population: Adolescents and youth, primarily middle school and high school students (Grades 6 through 12; ages 11 to 18 years).
• Administration Format: Self-administered pencil-and-paper questionnaire, secure computerized web survey, or digital tablet interface. Can be administered individually or in group/classroom settings.
• Item Count: 5 items.
• Response Scale: 4-point ordinal rating scale consisting of:
  • Very wrong
  • Wrong
  • A little bit wrong
  • Not wrong at all
• Scoring Protocols:
  • Standard Directional Coding: Items are typically coded such that higher numerical values reflect higher levels of antisocial attitude (risk):
    • Very wrong = 1
    • Wrong = 2
    • A little bit wrong = 3
    • Not wrong at all = 4
  • Scale Score Calculation: The overall subscale score is computed as the unweighted arithmetic mean of the completed items (ranging from 1.00 to 4.00), provided at least 4 of the 5 items have valid responses. Alternatively, a cumulative sum score (ranging from 5 to 20) may be derived.
  • Dichotomous Risk Thresholds: In state-level epidemiological surveillance (such as the CSAP Core Measures protocols), responses are often dichotomized: selecting “A little bit wrong” or “Not wrong at all” is classified as an endorsement of risk for that specific delinquent behavior.
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 3 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Favorable Attitudes Toward Antisocial Behavior Scale was formulated during the mid-1990s as part of the federally funded development of the Communities That Care (CTC) survey system by the Social Development Research Group (SDRG) at the University of Washington, with key initial psychometric validation literature published between 1995 and 2002. The scale is integrated into the Student Survey of Risk and Protective Factors and documented extensively within the Core Measures guidelines issued by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP).

Licensing and Accessibility: As an instrument developed with public federal funding (under grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and CSAP), the instrument items and survey modules are generally placed in the public domain for research, educational, and public health evaluation purposes. SDRG permits non-profit entities, academic researchers, school districts, and community prevention coalitions to administer the scale without licensing fees or royalty charges, provided appropriate citation and attribution are given to the original developers at the University of Washington. Commercial distribution or integration into proprietary fee-for-service diagnostic platforms requires formal authorization from the Social Development Research Group.

References

Arthur, M. W., Hawkins, J. D., Pollard, J. A., Catalano, R. F., & Baglioni, A. J. (2002). Measuring risk and protective factors for substance use, delinquency, and other adolescent problem behaviors: The Communities That Care Youth Survey. Evaluation Review, 26(6), 575–601. https://doi.org/10.1177/019384102237850

Catalano, R. F., & Hawkins, J. D. (1996). The social development model: A theory of antisocial behavior. In J. D. Hawkins (Ed.), Delinquency and crime: Current theories (pp. 149–197). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511527623.007

Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. (2001). CSAP’s core measures initiative: Assessment of risk and protective factors and substance use outcomes (pp. 61–63). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Glaser, R. R., Van Horn, M. L., Arthur, M. W., & Hawkins, J. D. (2005). Measurement properties of the Communities That Care Youth Survey across demographic groups. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 21(1), 73–102. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-004-1788-1

Hawkins, J. D., Catalano, R. F., & Miller, J. Y. (1992). Risk and protective factors for alcohol and other drug problems in adolescence and early adulthood: Implications for substance abuse prevention. Psychological Bulletin, 112(1), 64–105. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.64

Hawkins, J. D., Catalano, R. F., Morrison, D. M., O’Donnell, J., Abbott, R. D., & Day, L. E. (1992). The Seattle Social Development Project: Effects of the first four years on protective factors and problem behaviors. In J. McCord & R. E. Tremblay (Eds.), Preventing antisocial behavior: Interventions from birth through adolescence (pp. 139–161). Guilford Press.

Hawkins, J. D., Oesterle, S., Brown, E. C., Arthur, M. W., Abbott, R. D., Fagan, A. A., & Catalano, R. F. (2009). Results of a type 2 translational research trial to prevent adolescent drug use and delinquency: A test of Communities That Care. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 163(9), 789–798. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpediatrics.2009.141

Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 664–670. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089195

Items of the Scale