Understanding the Gap in Self-Reported Offending by Race: a Meta-Analysis
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Understanding the Gap in Self-Reported Offending by Race: a Meta-Analysis Tracy WP Sohoni 1
& Graham
C. Ousey 2
& Erica
Bower 3 & Alisha Mehdi 2
Received: 23 March 2020 / Accepted: 17 September 2020/ # Southern Criminal Justice Association 2020
Abstract Self-report data is valuable to criminologists for its potential at revealing offending patterns free from biases affecting official data obtained by police. An issue of great interest is whether racial differences in crime rates evident in official data persist when analyzing self-report offending data. In their landmark study, Elliott and Ageton (1980) argued that early self-report crime studies failed to find evidence of race differences primarily due to measurement limitations. They argued previous studies focused on minor offenses, contained item overlap and did not precisely measure high frequency offending, all of which obscured differences by race. After addressing these limitations through the design of the National Youth Survey, Elliott and Ageton reported evidence more consistent with official crime data, though differences were somewhat contingent on offense type and scaling method employed. Lessons of the Elliott and Ageton study placed an important imprint on the study of race and self-reported offending. Yet, a core question persists: Are Elliott and Ageton’s conclusions regarding the race-crime relationship confirmed by nearly four decades of research? To address this question, the current study uses meta-analysis methods to synthesize research since 1980 that estimates the association between self-reported measures of racial identification and self-reported offending. Findings suggest that while there is evidence of a statistically significant association between some measures of race and self-reported crime, nearly all measured relationships are extremely weak, generally approaching zero. Keywords Race . Ethnicity . Self-reported offending . Meta-analysis
Introduction The introduction of self-report survey data in criminology was an important breakthrough. It exposed numerous salient questions needing answers. Most importantly for
* Tracy WP Sohoni [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
American Journal of Criminal Justice
our interests was one centered on why the gap in offending rates of whites and blacks differed when comparing official (police data) and self-report data. Official data showed that offending rates were higher for blacks, but self-report surveys showed similar offending rates for these racial groups.1 Two prominent explanations emerged. The first argued that black-white offending differences in official data were a product of biases in law enforcement. Policing of blacks is more vigorous than policing of whites, therefore crime rates appeared higher for the former than latter. In contrast, the second explanation suggested that police data reflect actual behavioral differences between racial groups. It contended that inherent weaknesses in self-report survey data obscured ev
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