Violence, Street Code Internalization and the Moderating Effect of the Status-Violence Norm in German Schools

Abstract

This study examines Elijah Anderson’s (1999) proposition that violence is more likely in contexts that reward violence with status. However, people react differently to this so-called status-violence norm depending on their code internalisation. We address this interplay between code internalisation and the status-violence norm by analysing violence in 39 German schools, with 2,635 students. We make use of network data on status and violence reports in the large school dataset ‘Friendship and Violence in Adolescence’. Our school fixed-effect models account for previous shortcomings, namely heterogeneity between contexts and the selection of people into contexts, as they only compare students of the same school with each other. We find that students who have strongly internalised the code are more prone to violence than students who have not internalised this code. More importantly, our results show that students with a strong code are especially violent when the context rewards violence with status. Students who have not internalised this code are not affected by context variations.