Xenophobic attitudes and personal characteristics of adolescents with deviant behaviour

Abstract

There are often racial, ethnic intolerance among adolescents, which, in our opinion, caused by the presence of xenophobic attitudes, some combination of personality structures and situational factors. We hypothesized that there is a specificity of the relationship of xenophobic attitudes and personality characteristics in the structure of the person of adolescents with deviating (including illegal) behavior and normative behavior. The study involved 254 female and a teenage male aged 14 - 18 years. The study used a questionnaire to identify the severity of xenophobic attitudes, as well as the methodology and questionnaires to identify the personality characteristics of adolescents and semantic constructs of personality. As a result, significant differences were found in the personal features (criterion U-Mann-Whitney test with p <0,01) and semantic structures in adolescents with regulations and illegal behavior of offenders with a nationalist orientation and without it. The results can be used in the framework of the prevention of hate crimes among adolescents.

Keywords

• xenophobia
• xenophobic attitudes
• nationalism
• deviant behavior
• individual-psychological traits
• personality traits
• semantic structures
• juvenile offenders