Research on indicators of aggressive behaviour through Caprara’s “I-R” questionnaire: a study among adolescent people from Val Bormida

Abstract

The attention of criminological works to the young people started according to the increase of criminal behaviours of adolescent and the age of them. The results of our study concern the role of aggressivity, the irritability, antisocial behaviours subtending the deviance and youth delinquency. The Authors examined the results of a research carried out in Valle Bormida on a sample of 693 students of both sexes, aged from 13 to 17 years.The obtained results give us important information about Dissipation/Rumination andIrrit ability of sample, analysed in relation to three dimensions (sex, age and school attendance). The peculiarity of our study is the Caprara’s questionnaire “I-R” about “Indicators of aggressive behavior” investigated using two different original scales obtained in a reduced form, the Scale of Irritability and the Scale of Dissipation/Rumination.These Scales are for discovering components (elements) connected to the cognitive elaboration (memory, intentionality, mental trials of estimate, to award something to someone and to take a decision), that support an aggressive behaviour and for emphasizing that kind of aggression in which are important an high level of exciting and a low cognitive self-control of own behaviour with his relative consequences. The purpose of the present research is to explore and to study in depth the factors take part in juvenile deviance and determinate the juvenile delinquency. For a long time different criminologist studies are emphasized how many different peculiarities of young people, as the age, the sex, or the social status are connected not only to the possibility to make an offence but also to the choice of which kind (type) of offence to put into action.For that reason, our purpose is to be able to analyse and to break up complex phenomena as the aggressive behaviour, adolescent inconvenience, youth deviance until to the juvenile delinquency, to find strategies (instruments) to struggle (to contrast) with these problems.