Selfreports

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Self-reports

• Definition
• Samples of self-reports
• Quiz 2

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• A substantial amount of crime is not reported,
  but even many
• crimes reported or brought to the attention of
  law enforcement agents are not officially
  recorded.
• Thus, reliance on official sources, such as the
  UCR or NCVS introduces layers of potential bias
  between the actual behavior and the data
• Till 1950s, our understanding of the behavior of
  criminals was based almost entirely on official
  data

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Self-reports

• The basic approach of the self-report method is
  to ask individuals if they have engaged in
  delinquent or criminal behavior, and if so, how
  often they have done so.

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Self-reports data

• Created to complement UCR and NCVS
• Started in 1950s to tap hidden delinquency
• Ask individuals if they have engaged in
• delinquent or criminal behavior, and if so, how
  often they have done so

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Self-reports

• Demonstrate the prevalence of offending (the
  proportion of respondents who have committed a
  particular offence)
• Incidence of offending (the average number of
  offences per person in the study)

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Types of self-reports

• Longitudinal surveys Such reports can be
  obtained from the same group of people over a
  long period of time
• Cross-sectional surveys can be obtained from
  different groups of people at the same point in
  time

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Self-reports

• Most youths involved in violent crimes are never
  arrested for a violent crime (Elliott et al.,
  1989 Loeber et al., 1998 Huizinga et al., 1995)
• Thus, arrests seriously underestimate the volume
  of violent crime and fail to distinguish
  accurately between those who are and are not
  involved in violence

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Austin Porterfield (1943)

• The first published results from a self-report
• He analyzed the juvenile court records of 2,049
  delinquents (Texas) and identified 55 offenses
  for which they had been adjudicated
• Surveyed 437 students from three colleges in
  northern Texas to determine if and how frequently
  they had committed any of the 55 offenses
• Every one of the college students had committed
  at least one of these offenses

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Austin Porterfield (1943)

• The offenses committed by the college students
  were as serious as those committed by the
  adjudicated delinquents (although not as
  frequent), yet few of the college students had
  come into contact with legal authorities

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Wallerstein and Wylie (1947)

• Sampled a group of 1,698 adult men and women and
  examined self-reports of their delinquent
  behavior committed before the age of 16
• They mailed questionnaires containing 49 offenses
  to their sample
• Almost all reported committing at least one
  delinquent act included on their checklist

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Potential of self-reports

• By including questions about other aspects of
  adolescent life with a delinquency scale in the
  same questionnaire, researchers could explore
  etiological issues of delinquency
• Theoretically interesting issues concerning the
  family, Peers, and School

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Samples for self-reports

• Adult inmates of jails and prisons
• Adolescents, usually high school students
• The results of most self-report studies are
  shocking- for any population (even a law-abiding
  one), about 90 of the people in the sample have
  committed a crime (for which the punishment is
  more than a year in prison)
• Middle-class youth commit as much crime as
  working-class youth

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Violent offending by race..

• Self-reports and arrest rates provide different
  pictures of violent offending by race
• Self-reports reveal small differences between
  African American and white youths
• Arrest records, on the other hand, reveal large
  differences ( nine African American youths were
  arrested for every white youth in 2003)

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Explanations for this discrepancy

• Selective reporting of offenses to the police
• Different patterns of police surveillance
• Racial/ethnic biases on the part of police,
  victims, and witnesses (Austin Allen, 2000
  Sampson Lauritsen, 1997).

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Assessment of self-report studies

• Focus on minor and trivial offenses (truancy,
  running away from home, minor drug and alcohol
  use)
• Although recent studies (NYS) asked subjects
  about rape and robbery
• Respondents might not to tell the truth
  (reliability issues)

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Reliability and Validity

• Reliability is the extent to which a measuring
  procedure yields the same result on repeated
  trials
• If a bathroom scale were reliable, it would yield
  the same reading of your weight if you got on and
  off that scale 10 times in a row
• If it were unreliable, the reading of your weight
  would vary somewhat, even though your true weight
  would not change in the space of time it would
  take you to get on and off the scale 10 times

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Reliability

• No measure is absolutely, perfectly reliable
• Instrument will always produce some variation
  from one application to another.
• So the central question in assessing the
  reliability of self-reported delinquency measures
  is not whether the measure is reliable but how
  reliable it is

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Assessing reliability

• There are two classic ways of assessing the
  reliability of social science measures
• Test-retest reliability
• Internal consistency (multiple items measuring
  the same underlying concept should be highly
  intercorrelated)

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Test-retest reliability

• A sample of respondents is administered a
  self-reported delinquency inventory (the test)
• Then, after a short interval, the same inventory
  is readministered (the retest)
• In doing this, the same questions should be used
  at both times

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Validity

• Validity is a much more abstract notion than is
  reliability
• The best definition of validity is something like
  as follows A measure is valid to the extent to
  which it measures the concept you set out to
  measure, and nothing else

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If respondents lie.

• Self-report data can be checked against police
  records, school records, interviews with teachers
  and parents
• The use of, or threat of, polygraph validation
  (20 change their initial responses when
  threatened with a lie detector)
• Subsequent interviewing of subjects permits
  probing regarding the details and context of acts
• Use of lie scales

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Example of lie scale

• I always tell the truth
• Sometimes I tell lies
• Once in a while I get angry
• I never feel sad
• Sometimes I do things I am not supposed to do
• I have never taken anything that did not belong
  to me

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Assessment of self-report studies

• Several self-report studies included only boys
  (no female offending data)
• Overestimation of some crimes
• Ignore white collar crimes and serious violent
  crimes

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The National Survey of Youth

• Documents the deviant or delinquent behaviors of
  U.S. youth ages 12 to 16
• Started in 1976
• Testing criminological theories (Example of NYS)

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UCR, NCVS, and self-reports

• None of the three is perfect
• For the best estimates of the actual number of
  crimes, NCVS data are preferable
• For the best estimates of offender
  characteristics, self-reports and NCVS are
  preferable
• UCR are superior for understanding the
  geographical distribution of crime

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