Some cultural correlates of aggression as a response to frustration

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of some cultural practices on the choice of aggression in rBsponding to daily personal frustrations in Turkish society. The hypotheses were based on a modified version of the Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis combined with social learning theory. The independent variables consisted of three aspects of Turkish family life: (1) the use of overtly aggressive (verbal and physical) punishment as discipline technique by parents; (2) the arbitrariness of childhood frustrations; (3) overtly aggressive modeling by the father. Two additional independent variables were; (4) agreement with the Turkish masculine ideal, which was assumed to be a central cultural value, and (5) socio-economic status. The dependent variable was the choice of aggression as a response to frustration. It was hypothesized that aggression would be more frequently chosen as a response to frustration by Subjects: (1) whose parents used overtly aggressive punishment as a preferred discipline technique; (2) Whose parents used reasoning; (3) whose fathers serve as overtly aggressive models; (4) who show agreement with the Turkish masculine ideal; and (5) whose socioeconomic status is relatively low. To measure the independent and dependent variables five scales were constructed which were pretested with students of Bosphorus University. These questionnaires were administered to male adolescent students of two lycees representing two different SES levels. The data collected were subjected to Simple and Multiple Regression Analyses. All five hypotheses were supported at highly significant levels.