Discipline Across the Private and Public: Obedience, Attitudes towards Spanking, and Approval of Police Use of Force in the USA, 1986-2024
Overview of my 12,000 word dissertation.
This was written for the degree MSc Sociological Research.
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Abstract
There is evidence that authoritarianism is associated with attitudes towards domestic and societal punitiveness. This dissertation sources secondary data from the General Social Survey (GSS), a repeated cross-sectional nationally representative survey of the United States adult population, to examine the changes in authoritarian ideology (as measured by valuing obedience), domestic punitiveness (agreement with spanking children), and societal punitiveness (approval of police use of force) from 1986-2024.
Valuing obedience is consistently positively and significantly linked with spanking approval. From 2021 onward, the predictive relationship between these items has increased, even if the overall sentiment has declined. On average, both are falling out of favour as a child-rearing value and domestic practice. Those who still value obedience and agree with spanking may have an underlying ideology that increasingly connects the two.
Overall attitude towards police use of force is weakly but positively associated with spanking approval. Individual police scenarios, which present varying degrees of belligerent behaviour ranging from verbal obscenity to actively attacking the officer, do not seem to be consistently predictive of whether a respondent agrees with the necessity of spanking. Attitudes towards these police scenarios are increasingly polarised: more people are disagreeing on whether the situations are acceptable use of force or not. The relationship between spanking agreement and these police scenarios (whether considered individually or as a whole) is not consistently significant, although the statistical trends suggest that there are outside factors influencing the strength of the relationship.
Interestingly, obedience and overall approval for police use of force do not have a correlative relationship, and therefore the measure for authoritarian ideology does not mediate the association between the societal punitiveness and domestic punitiveness.