Measurement Problems in Criminal Justice Research Workshop Summary (2003) / Chapter Skim
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3. Comparison of Self-Report and Official Data for Measuring Crime
3. Comparison of Self-Report and Official Data for Measuring Crime
Pages 43-94
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Kroh~a There are three basic ways to measure criminal behavior on a large scale. The oldest method is to rely on official data collected by criminal justice agencies, such as data on arrests or convictions.
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Thus, prison data are less useful than court or police data as a measure of actual delinquent or criminal behavior. Moreover, the reactions of the juvenile and criminal justice systems often rely on information from victims or witnesses of crime.
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With few exceptions, these studies supported the general conclusion that, if there were any statistically significant relationship between measures of social status and self-reported delinquent behavior, it was weak and clearly did not mirror the findings of studies using official data sources.
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Despite the expanding applications of this methodology, questions remained about what self-report instruments measure. The discrepancy in findings regarding the relationship between social status and delinquency
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and by focusing on high-rate offenders, Elliott and Ageton found relationships between engaging in serious delinquent behavior and race and social class that are more consistent with results from studies using official data. Hindelang and colleagues (1979)
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Five of the most salient of these characteristics are the inclusion of (1) a wide array of offenses, including serious offenses; (2)
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The domain of crime covers a wide range of behaviors, from petty theft to aggravated assault and homicide. If the general domain of delinquent and criminal behavior is to be represented in a self-report scale, it is necessary for the scale to cover that same wide array of human activity.
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With increasing emphasis on the study of crime across the entire life course, self-report surveys have had to be developed to take into account both the deviant behavior of very young children and the criminal behavior of older adults. The behavioral manifestations of illegal behaviors or the precursors of such behavior can change depending on the stage in the life course at which the assessment takes place.
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Although most ofthese specific questions are skipped for most subjects since delinquency remains a rare event, this approach to measuring selfreported delinquency is a far cry from the initial days of the method, when subjects used a few categories to respond to a small number of trivial delinquencies with no follow-up items. Below we evaluate the adequacy of this approach for measuring delinquent and criminal behavior.
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Current self-report measures typically include 30 to 40 items measuring a wide array of delinquent acts. Just because someone was truant is no reason to expect that they would be involved in theft or vandalism.
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If so, there should be high internal consistency among self-reported delinquency items. While this result may be supportive of the theoretical assumption, it is not necessarily a good indicator of the reliability of the measures.
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Their self-reportinventory was quite extensive,consisting of 69 items divided into the following major subindices: official contact index, serious crime index, delinquency index, drug index, and school and family offenses index. While mindful of the limitations of internal consistency approaches, Hindelang and colleagues (1981)
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Assessing Validity There are several ways to assess validity. We concentrate on three: content validity, construct validity, and criterion validity.
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The self-report inventory used by the three projects of the Program of Research on the Causes and Correlates of Delinquency has 32 items that measure delinquent behavior and 12 that measure substance use. These more recent measures, while not perfect, tap into a much broader range of delinquent and criminal behaviors.
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Overall, construct validity may offer the strongest evidence for the validity of self-report measures of delinquency and crime. Indeed, if one examines the general literature on delinquent and criminal behavior, it is surprising how few theoretically expected relationships are not observed for self-reported measures of delinquency and crime.
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The real issue is not whether groups differ but the extent to which individuals have similar scores on the self-report measure and on other measures of criminal behavior. A variety of external criteria have been used (see the discussion in Hindelang et al., 19811.
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For African American males, however, the correlation is at best moderate. 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.
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The Pittsburgh study, as one of three projects in the Program of Research on the Causes and Correlates of Delinquency, uses the same self-reported delinquency index as described earlier for the Rochester Youth Development Study. Farrington et al.
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Criterion Validity for Substance Use The previous studies focused on delinquent or criminal behavior where, as mentioned earlier, there is no true external criterion for evaluating validity. There is an external criterion for one class of deviant behavior substance use.
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Similarly, in Philadelphia 28 percent self-reported marijuana use and 32 percent tested positive. 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.
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The self-report method for measuring this rather sensitive topic undetected criminal behavior appears to be reasonably valid. The content validity of the recent inventories is acceptable, the construct validity is quite high, and the criterion validity appears to be in the moderate-to-strong range.
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There is a considerable amount of underreporting, and there is also the potential problem of differential validity. Nevertheless, content validity and construct validity appear to be quite high, and an overall estimate of criterion validity would be in the moderate-to-strong range.
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Randomized Response Technique The randomized response technique assumes that the basic problem with the validity of self-reported responses is that respondents are trying to conceal sensitive information; that is, they are unwilling to report undetected criminal behavior as long as there is any chance of others, including the researchers, linking the behavior to them. Randomized response techniques allow respondents to conceal what they really did while at the same time providing useful data to researchers.
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In this approach, underreporting was related to females, African American females, respondents with a high need for approval, lower-income respondents, and persons with a larger number of arrests. Overall, it is not clear to what extent a randomized response approach actually generates more complete and accurate reporting.
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Computer-Assisted Interviewing 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, 19911.
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In addition, a growing body of research has demonstrated that antisocial behavior is rather stable from childhood to adulthood (Farrington, 1989a; Huesmann et al., 1984; Moffitt, 1993; Olwous, 19791. Much of this work has relied on official data.
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Self-Report Measures for Children Antisocial behavior has been likened to a chimera (Patterson, 1993) with manifestations that change and accumulate with age.
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They surveyed a sample of 849 first-grade and 868 fourth-grade boys using a 33-item self-reported antisocial behavior scale. This is a younger-age version of the self-reported delinquency index used by the three projects of the Program of Research on the Causes and Correlates of Delinquency.
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, and the potential for very serious criminal behaviors, at least among a small subset of chronic violent offenders. Weitekamp (1989)
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Panel or Testing Effects 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. While these advances are significant, they have increased the potential for the data to be contaminated by testing or panel effects.
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Hence, it appears that the panel design itself, rather than the design of the specific questions, had the effect of decreasing prevalence rates. The observed decline in age-specific rates could be due to an underlying secular drop in offenses during these years (1976-19811.
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Overall, Lauritsen offers two explanations for the observed testing effects. One concerns generalized panel fatigue, suggesting that as respondents are asked the same inventory at repeated surveys they become less willing to respond affirmatively to screening questions.
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Because of that, we have begun to assess this issue using the self-report and official data collected in the Rochester Youth Development Study. As in previous studies, two comparisons can be made: (1)
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The second panel in Table 3-1 presents the association between official arrests and self-reported general delinquency and drug use. If the selfreport data are valid, it can be expected that subjects who report offending will be more apt to have an official record than subjects who do not.
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Overall, when self-reported arrests and official arrests are compared, there is little evidence of differential attrition by gender or race/ethnicity and all the coefficients are reasonably high. For the comparison between self-reported delinquency/drug use and official arrests, however, validity is lower for African Americans than Hispanics.
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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.
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In the exceptional case the number of arrests for violent offenses is so sparse over time that we do not think the estimate is reliable. Overall, therefore, these results based on the same subjects suggest that self-report and official data yield the same substantive conclusion on this central issue.
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While there is certainly room for improvement, the validity appears acceptable for most analytical tasks. At a more specific level, however, there is a potentially serious problem with differential validity in that African American males have lower validity than do Hispanic males.
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More research is needed to measure the size of this effect and its sources and to identify methods to reduce its threat to the validity of self-report data in the longitudinal studies so crucial to etiological investigation. The similarities and differences in our understanding of criminal career parameters in self-report data and official data are just beginning to be investigated.
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Lauer 1983 Are self-reports of adolescent deviance valid? Biochemical measures, randomized response, and the bogue pipeline in smoking behavior.
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Monroe 1961 Social correlates of early adolescent theft. American Sociological Review 26:733743.
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Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 50:433-440. Hawkins, J.D., R.F.
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1973 Inner containment and delinquency. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 64:464-470.
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1993 Life-course-persistent and adolescence-limited antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. PsychologicalReview 100:674-701.
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Laub 1990 Crime and deviance over the life course: The salience of adult social bonds. American Sociological Review 55 :609-627.
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Fox 1981 The validity of randomized response for sensitive measurements. American Sociological Review 46: 187-200.
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Widom, C.S. 1989 Child abuse, neglect, and violent criminal behavior.
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