NCJ Number
186390
Journal
Youth & Society Volume: 32 Issue: 2 Dated: December 2000 Pages: 147-164
Editor(s)
Kathryn G. Herr
Date Published
2000
Length
18 pages
Annotation
Because the youth culture of gabbers has been the most remarkable youth culture of the past decade in the Netherlands and has been subject to many years of negative stereotyping in the media, a study was conducted that compared gabbers to non-gabber peers using a sample of 1,147 Dutch adolescents.
Abstract
At the beginning of the 1990's, a new youth culture began to emerge in the Netherlands, the youth culture of gabbers. In the media, these gabbers, who loved loud music and took speed and pep pills to keep up with the fast music rhythms, were depicted as uneducated, violent, racist, sexist, and homophobic. Despite the growing number of negative reports in the media, "demonic" or gabberhouse music became the most popular music among Dutch adolescents in 1997. The current study of gabbers looked at what made them so special and the extent to which they differed from non-gabber peers. The study sample of 1,147 adolescents, 54 percent boys and 46 percent girls, had an average age of 15.7 years and was selected from 8 schools in 4 cities. Gabbers were compared to non-gabbers in terms of background characteristics, attitudes, involvement in the gabber culture, and leisure activities. Results showed gabbers clearly differed from non-gabbers in their taste for music and clothes but differed less than expected in their ideas about a normal way of life, foreigners, enjoying life, and drugs. The gabber feeling and gabber music were more popular among younger respondents and among respondents with Dutch-born parents than among older and immigrant respondents. Gender and education level also had an influence on gabber identity through the external dimension of the preference for music and clothes. However, relationships between gabber identity and background characteristics were not particularly strong. Although visiting gabber parties and drug use go hand in hand, the relationship between the two was not very strong. Drug use was not a characteristic of the feeling of being a gabber, although it was typical of young people in a gabber outfit and was thus related to the preference for gabber music. 29 references, 1 table, and 1 figure