Self-Reported Versus Official Offending
Other than official data, self-report data is the second most utilized source for information on offending. Recognizing the inherent limitations of official and self-report data in terms of sources for crime measurement, this chapter provides an in-depth
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Self-Reported Versus Official Offending
4.1
Research on Self-Reported Offending
It is the case that most knowledge about criminal careers has been based on official records of arrests or convictions. However, it is thought that official records include only the “tip of the iceberg” of offending and that officially recorded offenses may be a biased and unrepresentative sample of all offenses committed. It is argued that self-reports of offending might provide a more accurate picture of the true number of offenses committed. However, there are doubts about the validity of self-reports of offending, because people may conceal, exaggerate, or forget. The first assessment of self-reporting offending surveys on standard psychometric criteria such as questionnaire construction, administration procedure, objective scoring, norms for various populations, internal consistency, retest stability, and concurrent and predictive validity was completed in the Cambridge Study (Farrington 1973). The most important subsequent methodological assessments have been carried out by Hindelang et al. (1981), Huizinga and Elliott (1986), Farrington et al. (1996), Junger-Tas and Marshall (1999), Thornberry and Krohn (2000), and Krohn et al. (2010), while more specific methodological issues, such as scale construction and item validity, have been addressed by Lauritsen (1998), Piquero et al. (2002), and Osgood et al. (2002). The key issue is validity: To what extent do self-reports produce an accurate estimate of the true number of offenses committed? How accurately do self-reports measure the prevalence, frequency, and seriousness of offending? Setting aside the less important issues of content and construct validity, the validity of self-reports is usually assessed by comparing them with some external criterion of offending (usually based on official records). The comparison can be concurrent (measure and criterion at the same time) or predictive (measure before criterion). The best test of the predictive validity of self-reported offending surveys is to investigate to what extent self-reports predict future convictions among people who do not have an official record.
D.P. Farrington et al., Offending from Childhood to Late Middle Age: Recent Results from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, SpringerBriefs in Criminology, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-6105-0_4, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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Self-Reported Versus Official Offending
Only two studies of predictive validity among unconvicted people have been carried out in the United Kingdom, both in the Cambridge Study. Among unconvicted boys, a measure of self-reported variety of offending at age 14 significantly predicted convictions in the next three years (Farrington 1973). This test was later replicated for specific types of offenses. Among boys not convicted for burglary up to age 18, 20% of those self-reporting burglary were subsequently convicted for burglary up to age 32, compared with only 2% of those who denied committing burglary up to age 18 (F
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