The Influence of Hip-hop Culture on the Perceptions, Attitudes, Values, and Lifestyles of African-American College Students

Hip-hop music includes aspects that have been viewed as part of an oppositional culture, personified by profanity, violence, and aggressive behaviors. This study examined the potentially negative influence of hip-hop culture on 116 African-American college students' attitudes and lifestyle trends. Based on Bandura's social learning theory, it was theorized that hip-hop culture impacted college students via observation, imitation and social modeling. Using a mixed method design composed of survey measures and focus groups, research questions focused on identifying favorable attitudes towards hip-hop culture, mass media consumption habits, music video frequency, attitudes about hip-hop and rap music and lifestyle preferences. Cross tabulations of frequency data from the survey measures demonstrated that ninety-one percent of the students favored hip-hop music, ninety-four percent reported watching hip-hop music videos, and eighty percent reported Black Entertainment Television (BET) as their most favorable music network. Content analysis of the focus group findings revealed that the participants expressed a positive attitude towards misogynist values and adopted lifestyles trends such as styles of dress and language commonly associated with hip-hop culture. This study demonstrates the potentially negative effects of hip-hop culture on the attitudes and lifestyles of African-American college students. Future recommendations for research include developing interventions that lessen the negative impact of hip-hop culture, which would lead to positive social change for the African American community.

Bandura further argued that reinforcement and punishment plays an important
part in influencing the learning of new values and behaviors. Social learning
theory and the application of reinforcement tend to also shape the reward
process by ...