Gender-Specific Conflicts among Urban African-American Youth: The Roles of Situational Context and Issues of Contention

The literatures on violence among young men and young women have highlighted the importance of situational context. However, few studies have compared disputes that do not result in violence with those that do, and even fewer have been positioned to investigate the role situational context may play across gender in accounting for these outcomes. Drawing on recent scholarship on gender and violence, this research explores the situational contexts of youth conflicts among African-American adolescent boys and girls. Using a large sample of narrative accounts of 153 violent and nonviolent conflicts, we examine how youth describe the issues of contention in their conflicts, how these relate to the situational contexts in which conflicts emerge, and similarities and differences in the antecedents, contexts, and extent of male and female violence.