The Association Between Right-Wing Political Ideology and Youth Distress
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The Association Between Right-Wing Political Ideology and Youth Distress Avital Laufer Æ Mally Shechory Æ Zahava Solomon
Published online: 28 August 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract The study examines the association between ideological worldviews among youth and the sense of distress resulting from political events. It examines two hypotheses: the first is that events that contradict ideological worldviews are associated with greater distress levels and the second is that the higher the level of ideological commitment, the higher the distress level will be, regardless of the type of stressor. Therefore this study examines distress levels among right-wing adolescents exposed to two different political stressors: (a) Palestinian terror—which matches their right-wing ideology that regards the Palestinians as an enemy, and (b) the evacuation of settlements—which contradicts their right-wing ideology. As expected, higher distress levels were found during evacuation of settlements, compared to the response to Palestinian terror. It was also found that ideological commitment was positively associated with levels of distress with regard to both stressors.
The study was supported by the R&D Center—Samaria & Jordan Rift and by the Adler Research Center, Tel Aviv University. A. Laufer (&) School of Behavioral Sciences, Social Science, Netanya Academic College, 1 University St. Kiryat Itzhak Rabin, Netanya 42365, Israel e-mail: [email protected] M. Shechory Department of Criminology, Ariel University Center of Samaria, Ariel, Israel e-mail: [email protected] M. Shechory Department of Criminology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel Z. Solomon Bob Shapell School of Social Work, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel e-mail: [email protected]
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Keywords Youth Terror Disengagement BSI Distress Political stand Right-wing ideology
In recent years Israeli adolescents have dealt with two significant political stressors. The first is the wave of terror that has raged through Israel since September 2000, and the second is the evacuation of settlements in Gush Katif and Northern Samaria during August–September 2005. Political events such as terror and war (Ronen et al. 2003; Garbarino et al. 1991; Garbarino and Kostelny 1996), the assassination of political leaders (Klingman 2001; Raviv et al. 1998), internal displacement and resettlement (Erol et al. 2005; Shacham and Lahad 2004), and a range of other violent politically related events (Slone et al. 2000; Slone et al. 1998) were all found to have a negative effect on the well being of adolescents. The negative reactions that were found included symptoms of anxiety and depression, feelings of pain and anger, vulnerability, helplessness, somatic complaints and behavioral problems. The association between political events and the feelings of distress experienced by adolescents depends on numerous factors, one of them may be the political ideological worldviews of the youth. However, only a small body
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