The Myth of a Sub-Culture of Corporal Punishment

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Abstract
This paper addresses the question of whether adolescents coming from families using physical punishment have disciplinary beliefs similar to adolescents coming from families not using physical punishment. A related question is whether different ethnic groups share similar disciplinary beliefs. Anglo and Hispanic adolescents were asked to judge the appropriateness of certain disciplinary actions for specific teenage misbehaviors and asked if "physical punishments" were used in their families. Individual response profiles were compared and tested for patterns of clustering indicative of attitudinal sub-cultures. A Cultural Consensus Model was used to create an empirically derived description of community disciplinary standards and to calculate individual deviance from the standard. Results indicated that Hispanic and Anglo adolescents did not differ significantly in their disciplinary attitudes nor in the proportion of each group reporting physical punishment at home. Rather, a single value system was detected and adolescents reporting physical punishment were more likely to be on the periphery of that system. There appears to be a common set of beliefs concerning appropriate disciplinary actions and adolescents reporting physical punishment deviate from this norm. Furthermore, physically punished adolescents do not share a single well-defined set of values among themselves, but instead deviate in a variety of ways from the consensual view.
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