describing sexual behavior in the era of the internet: a typology for empirical research

This article uses the Mobile Youth Survey (MYS) to quantitatively evaluate Elijah Anderson's seminal theory of African-American youth in Philadelphia, the Code of the Street. Using longitudinal data and Structural Equation Modeling, we identify characteristics that lead underclass youth to adopt or to reject a “street code” mentality. Like other studies of Anderson's Code of the Streets, we examine family and peer relationships, neighborhood control and stability, victimization and negative emotional reactions as predictors of adolescents' street code orientation. At the same time, we introduce for the first time, hopelessness, defined as a state of mind in which individuals have a negative perception of their future, into the intellectual and social equation. Results show that hopelessness plays an instrumental role in adopting street code beliefs. Specifically, adolescents reporting greater hopelessness in 2004 were more likely to identify with the street code in 2005; by extension, adolescents who identified with the street code in 2005 were also more involved in violence.