Bartusch, Dawn Jeglum, and Ross L. Matsueda: Gender and Reflected Appraisals

Katie A. Farina & Kelly Welch

While traditional criminological theories have predominantly focused on explaining male criminality, some recent theorists have explored important gender differences in offending. Dawn Jeglum Bartusch and Ross L. Matsueda are among the contemporary researchers who have examined delinquency patterns according to gender, and they have made noteworthy contributions to criminological theory through their symbolic interactionist approach to understanding gender socialization, the application of individual deviant labels, and reflected self-appraisals. Their work has emerged as an important explanation for variation between male and female delinquency. The symbolic interactionist perspective of Bartusch and Matsueda is rooted in the earlier works of George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer, and others who argued that human actions are best understood in terms of the meanings that other significant individuals attribute to those behaviors through various interactions and communications. This assignment of meaning results in what Charles Horton Cooley referred to as the looking glass self , which ...

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