Klein, ed. For example, Short and Nye (1957) used a four-point response with the highest category being often. Aggregated over many items, these limited response sets had the consequence of lumping together occasional and high-rate delinquents, rather than discriminating between these behaviorally different groups. Respondents who are in the most serious category based on their self-report responses are significantly more likely to have juvenile court petitions, both concurrently and predictively. People are generally not good at this, he finds, but there are interesting sex differences. In laboratory settings, men are better at perceiving their inner physiological states than are women, but the difference is largely erased when the studies are conducted in a more natural environment. These developments have made self-report studies an integral part of the way crime and delinquency are studied. Tremblay, R.E., C. Japel, D. Perusse, P. McDuff, M. Boivin, M. Zoccolillo, and J. Montplaisir 1999 The search for the age of onset of physical aggression: Rousseau and Bandura revisited. Many individual items are required to represent the entire domain of delinquent behavior, to represent each of its subdomains, and to ensure that each subdomain (e.g., violence, drug use) is itself adequately represented. However, most early self-report instruments failed to include serious offenses in the inventory and truncated the response categories for the frequency of offenses. The gender differences were quite persistent, but the race differences were more pronounced for less frequent offenders and diminished considerably for more frequent offenders. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. One reason for the use of computer-assisted data collection that is particularly relevant for this paper is its potential for collecting sensitive information in a manner that increases the confidentiality of responses. 1964 An empirical test of differential association theory. Whether these same problems are evident under the enhanced confidentiality of audio interviews is an open question. Crime surveys, such as self-report surveys, help determine precisely how to counter crime rates and whether changes are needed in the system. The two major studies of this topic produced different results: Weis and Van Alstyne (1979). Reliability is the extent to which a measuring procedure yields the same result on repeated trials. This survey is one of the most important sources of self-report data on criminal careers and the causes of offending, although concerns have been raised about testing effects in it (Thornberry, 1989; Lauritsen, 1999). Stone. List of the Advantages of Survey Research. For behaviors that are more sporadic, on the other hand, it is better to ask decompositional questions (i.e., to help the respondent by breaking the problem up into chunks). Since those very early studies, the self-report methodology has become much more sophisticated in design, making it more reliable and valid and extending its applicability to myriad issues. Roger Tourangeau of the National Opinion Research Center further analyzed the distinction between questions designed to encourage estimation and questions designed to encourage recall of individual events. Maxfield and colleagues (2000) did find lower reporting for females than males. Pp. BETHESDA, MARYLAND-The accuracy and reliability of reports of one's own behavior and physical state are at the root of effective medical practice and valid research in health and psychology. Loeber, R., P. Wung, K. Keenan, B. Giroux, and M. Stouthamer-Loeber 1993 Developmental pathways in disruptive child behavior. Loeber and colleagues reported that the great majority of boys understood most of the items. From these data, prevalence, variety, and frequency scores and means and variances can be estimated, and the information can be correlated with other variables, just as is done with regular self-report data. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations present in article comments are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of APS or the articles author. If everyone in a study takes half as many pills as they say they did, the FDA-approved and officially sanctioned dosage will be twice as high as the dosage that most people reported worked best. Positive bias. Los Angeles: Kluwer Academic Publishers. If the child still did not understand the question, the item was skipped. Kesslers test, intended for screening large populations and subject to severe budget constraints, is an extreme version of this problem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Each is discussed below. Clark, J.P., and E.P. behaviors that violate criminal law and that place the individual at some risk of arrest if the behavior were known to the police. Much work has been done to improve the reliability and validity of self-reports, including the introduction of specialized techniques intended to enhance the quality of self-report data. If the measure does not change to reflect the developmental stage, the accuracy of the measure is likely to deteriorate and the study of change is compromised. New York: Plenum. In wave 12 only the global question was asked. For example, Aquilino (1994) found that admission of alcohol and drug use is lowest in telephone interviews, somewhat higher in face-to-face interviews, and highest in self-administered questionnaires (see also Aquilino and LoSciuto, 1990; Turner et al., 1992). Perhaps the conclusion reached by Hindelang and colleagues (1981:114) is still the most reasonable: The self-report method appears to behave reasonably well when judged by standard criteria available to social scientists. Menard, S. and D.S. Computer software can be programmed to include skip patterns and increase the probability that the respondent will answer all appropriate questions. The children were, however, more likely to forget abuse at the hands of individuals closest to them (i.e., in terms of familial relation, familiarity, or friendship). Where we have other validation, thats great! In general, self-report measures of delinquency and crime, especially the more recent longer inventories, appear to have a high degree of construct validity. Individuals who have been arrested and brought to central booking stations are interviewed and asked to provide urine specimens. Some research, especially in the alcohol and drug use area, has found a method effect. To examine this issue more systematically, Brame, Bushway, Paternoster, and Thornberry (2001) used both self-report data and official data on subjects in the Rochester Youth Development Study. Changing the measure over time, however, creates its own set of problems, especially for the study of change. This effect likely would be unequally distributed across respondents because those who had the most extensive involvement in delinquency would have the most time to lose by answering affirmatively to the delinquency items. The Nation's Two Crime Measures. They found that 21 percent of respondents with no arrest history self-reported being arrested. Developments in self-report methods have improved the quality of data collected and have expanded their applicability to the study of antisocial behavior throughout the life course. Health Standards, Data Paper presented to the American Society of Criminology, Philadelphia. These correlations are quite high in the Hindelang et al. Here there does seem to be a slight downward drift in the size of the relationship over time. Hence, it appears that the panel design itself, rather than the design of the specific questions, had the effect of decreasing prevalence rates. They also serve the role of gauging the country's social indicators. New York: Cambridge University Press. Journal of Criminal Justice 21:433-445. For the ever-variety self-reported delinquency score, the correlation is 0.35, and the average across the other self-reported measures is 0.30. The worst comparison in this particular examination of the Drug Use Forecasting data was from Houston, where 15 percent of arrestees self-reported marijuana use and 43 percent tested positive. Although the self-report method began with the contributions of. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book. Linda Williams of the University of New Hampshires Family Research Laboratory has documented the other side of this issue, the false negative for a documented event. The Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) project (1990), sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, is an ongoing assessment of the extensiveness of drug use for samples of arrestees in cities throughout the country. For irregular behaviors, a rule is less useful, and it is desirable to encourage the subject to recal1 each instance, using an enumeration strategy. Tifft 1966 Polygraph and interview validation of self-reported delinquent behavior. Advances in both computer hardware and software have made the introduction of computers in the actual data collection process not only a possibility but, according to Tourangeau and Smith (1996:276), perhaps the most commonly used method of face-to-face data collection today. The use of computers in the data collection process began in the 1970s with computer-assisted telephone surveys (Saris, 1991). Focusing on the relationship between delinquent behavior and the socioeconomic status of the adolescents parents, Nye et al. Table 3-1 presents the results for the total Rochester sample at each of, TABLE 3-1 Yules Q Comparing the Prevalence of Self-Reported and Official Data, Rochester Youth Development Study, Total Panel, Self-reported arrestsa with official arrests (n = 834 to 940), Self-reported delinquency/ drug use with official arrests (n = 836 to 943). Reiss 1978 Response effects in the National Crime Survey. Farrington et al. Lefkowitz, and L.O. First, the validity of the earlier self-report scales, and the results based on them, are at best questionable. American Sociological Review 55:609-627. The studies by Thornberry and Lauritsen suggest that it is likely there is some degree of panel bias in self-report data collected in longitudinal panel studies. Second, in situations where other people might be nearby, the questions and responses are not heard by anyone but the respondent. In self-reports, prevalence and individual offending frequency were higher, the age of onset was earlier, and the concentration of offending was greater (Farrington et al., 2000:21). Previous studies have used both self-reported data and official data, but typically not on the same individuals. This is called an audio computer-assisted self-administered interview (ACASI). Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features? All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. This is an understudied topic that needs greater investigation. These studies found that, while most juveniles engaged in some delinquency, relatively few committed serious delinquency repetitively. This method of data collection is used extensively both in the United States and abroad (Klein, 1989). Brame, R., S. Bushway, R. Paternoster, and T.P. To assess the validity of self-reported delinquent behavior among elementary school children, Loeber and his colleagues compared the childrens self-reports to parental reports about similar behaviors. For starters, a physicians question such as Youre taking the pills the way I prescribed, arent you? is not likely to uncover any problems with compliance. 1986 Stepping Stones to Adult Criminal Careers. Laub 1990 Crime and deviance over the life course: The salience of adult social bonds. Current self-report measures typically include 30 to 40 items measuring a wide array of delinquent acts. Moreover, the reactions of the juvenile and criminal justice systems often rely on information from victims or witnesses of crime. Tracy, P.E., and J.A. By adding random error to the picture, poor reliability attenuates or reduces the size of the observed correlation coefficients. There are several ways to assess validity. The previous studies focused on delinquent or criminal behavior where, as mentioned earlier, there is no true external criterion for evaluating validity. Rounding errors are frequent when self-reported time intervals approach conventional discrete units of time (e.g., an hour, a week, a month, a year). The information also helps determine risk-prone areas, those that need more police patrol based on the times when crimes increase. Huizinga and Elliott report 22 estimates of test-retest reliability (across indices and across frequency and variety scores), and the mean reliability coefficient is 0.74. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Moffitt, and A. Caspi 1998 The development of male offending: Key findings from the first decade of the Pittsburgh Youth Study. 1966 Socio-economic status and reported delinquent behavior. For the 11-year-old cohort, the rate of change was also negative but not statistically significant. Antisocial behavior has been likened to a chimera (Patterson, 1993) with manifestations that change and accumulate with age. There is a high degree of concordance between the official arrest histories and the self-reported arrest histories for the Rochester subjects. The best way to examine this is to compare self-reported delinquent behavior and official measures of delinquency. The domain of crime covers a wide range of behaviors, from petty theft to aggravated assault and homicide. They then used juvenile court petitions as an external criterion to assess the validity of the self-reported responses. classified each of the boys in the Pittsburgh study into one of four categories based on the seriousness of their self-reported delinquency: no delinquency, minor delinquency only, moderate delinquency only, and serious delinquency. 1966 Delinquency school attendance and dropout. There is no hard-and-fast rule for assessing the appropriateness of this lag, but somewhere in the range of one to four weeks appears to be optimal. As was the case with the Seattle data, African American males substantially underreported their involvement in delinquency. There is no evidence of a strong developmental trend for these data. Subjects who have an official contact or arrest were, generally speaking, willing to report that to their interviewers. There are three main types of crime reports in the US criminal system: crime reports, victim surveys, and self-report surveys (SRS). Although a reasonable expectation for attitudinal measures, this expectation is less reasonable for behavioral inventories such as self-report measures of delinquency. We remember an average of the moment of peak intensity and the pain at the end of the procedure. The concern is that this approach will make respondents increasingly unwilling to admit to delinquent acts because those responses will increase the overall length of the interview. This would not account for the drop in the age-specific rates observed by Thornberry (1989), however. It expects the machine to last six years and to operate for 30,000 hours during that time. Overall, about two-thirds of the boys with court petitions answered in the affirmative. Klein, ed. American Sociological Review 28:826-834. For example, respondents have included as thefts such pranks as hiding a classmates books in the respondents locker between classes, or as serious assault events that are really roughhousing between siblings. Krohn, M.D., A.J. What is needed to untangle this link, he says, are prospective studies. Patterson, G.R., and R. Loeber 1982 The Understanding and Prediction of Delinquent Child Behavior. Porterfield (1943, 1946) and Wallerstein and Wylie (1947), the work of Short and Nye (1957, 1958) revolutionized ideas about the feasibility of using survey procedures with a hitherto taboo topic and changed how the discipline thought about delinquent behavior itself (Hindelang et al., 1981:23). For the very young child, measures have been developed that are administered to parents to assess antisocial behavior such as noncompliance, disobedience, and aggression (Achenbach, 1992). The average Yules Q is 0.81 across the 11 waves, and the range is from 0.68 to 0.89. It is now one of the fundamental ways to scientifically measure criminality, and it forms the bedrock of etiological studies. The development and widespread use of the self-report method of collecting data on delinquent and criminal behavior together were one of the most important innovations in criminology research in the twentieth century. Five of the most salient of these characteristics are the inclusion of (1) a wide array of offenses, including serious offenses; (2) frequency response sets; (3). It is possible that offenses committed at these ages (early 20s) are less public and therefore somewhat less well correlated with arrest data. Another way Huizinga and Elliott assessed the level of test-retest reliability is by estimating the percentage of the sample that changed frequency responses by two or less. duce some variation from one application to another. Research on criminal careers (Blumstein et al., 1986) has documented the importance of examining such issues as the age of onset (Krohn et al., 2001) and the duration of criminal activity (Wolfgang et al., 1987). With respect to reliability, this approach to measuring involvement in delinquency and crime appears to be acceptable. It is impossible for the interviewer to know whether a yes response is produced by the coin or by the fact that the respondent actually smoked marijuana. Self-Reported Surveys *** Based on many of the same principles as victim surveys but focusing instead on offenders, self- reported surveys are a third source of data from criminologists. HRA, The UCR provides information on eight crime classifications. Finally, Lauritsen examined whether this testing effect is due to the introduction of detailed follow-up questions during wave 4 of the NYS or whether it appeared to be produced by general panel fatigue. Olson 1958 Socioeconomic status and delinquent behavior. Cross-sectional trend data from the Monitoring the Future (MTF) study, which cannot be influenced by a testing effect, do not indicate any such secular decline (see Thornberry, 1989). Condition-targeted health assessments for service line growth. There are no perfectly valid measures, but some measures are more valid than others. Pp. Nye 1957 Reported behavior as a criterion of deviant behavior. (Yes, this suggests that to avoid an overdose of medication, it may be best to be no more compliant than the average participant in the clinical trial that determined the proper dose!) It is not clear whether this is a problem with the self-reports (i.e., positive bias) or with the official records such as sealed records, sloppy record keeping, use of aliases, and so forth. Criminology 13:427-448. Patterson, G.R. In these studies, children who were seen at hospitals for instances of sexual abuse were asked, many years later, to recall any such events. Visher 1986 Criminal Careers and Career Criminals. Learn more about this topic in our most recent guide, Value of Self-Reported Population Health Data: Tips for Gathering Reliable, Actionable Insights.. The two most common approaches are to compare self-reported delinquency scores with official arrest records and self-reports of arrest records with official arrest records. 371-398 in Cross-National Research in Self-Reported Crime and Delinquency, M.W. We concentrate on three: content validity, construct validity, and criterion validity. Thrasher, F. 1927 The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. Pardon | Commutation, Sentence & Parole, Office of Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP): History, Role & Purpose. One of the roles of crime surveys is predictive policing. We can begin by examining the correlation between self-reported official contacts and official measures of delinquency. The confidence one feels in the validity of ones recall also has little correlation with its accuracy. The students also self-reported whether they smoked and how often. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. American Journal of Sociology 49:199-208. Hawkins, J.D., R.F. Data compiled in victim and self-report surveys is analyzed and used to provide additional resources like lighting and CCTV, develop and refine theories of crime, and create crime prevention policies for police implementation. HRAs collect this type of data. Understanding Victimization Risk: Lifestyle Factors & Routine Activities, Sampson & Laub's Age-Graded Theory | Overview, Development & Effects. Hawkins, R.F. Given the secretive nature of criminal behavior, however, there is nothing comparable to a scale in the world of crime. The reliability coefficients vary somewhat depending on the number and types of delinquent acts included in the index and the scoring procedures used (e.g., simple frequencies or ever-variety scores), but scores well above 0.80 are common.
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