SOCY 275 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Uniform Crime Reports, Scalability, Internal Consistency
15 Jun 2018
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September 26, 2017
Uniform crime reports
- Counting rules
o Violent crimes
▪ Crimes against the person are going to be counted per victim.
▪ Robbery counts as a violent crime
o Nonviolent crimes
▪ Recorded as every separate distinct operation and location
• Same time, location and circumstance = 1
• Stealing 3 laptops in one room at 1 time = 1
• Stealing 1 laptop in three locations = 3
o Multiple offenses
▪ Record only the most serious offence
▪ Note: the criminal gets charged for all things but only the most serious
offence is recorded in the crime statistics
▪ One crime per victim
- Incident based
o Gather other information on the victim (e.g. age, gender, relationship with the
accused, level of injury, type of weapon causing the injury, drug or alcohol abuse)
and on the accused (age, gender, type of charges laid or recommended) and on the
circumstance of the incident (date, time, location, type of violation, if there was a
weapon present)
Crime rates
- (Number of crimes recorded by the police in a year / estimated population for that year)
x 100,000 = crime rate
Self report method:
- Researchers ask people (questionnaire, interviews) how many times they did certain
things
o E.g. how many times did you steal a car
- Discovered that most people have committed at least one crime in their lives
- Reliability (same outcome on repeated application)
o Internal consistency
▪ Ask the same question twice but at a different point in the
interview/questionnaire
o Scalability
▪ Not measuring everyone the same way? (someone who steals 15 cars isn’t
the same as someone who steals 2 cars)
o Equivalent forms
▪ Ask the same question a different way
o Test-retest
▪ Give the questionnaire today, and give the same questionnaire another day
to see if you get the same answers
- Validity—are we actually measuring the things of interest
o Different settings
▪ Compare self reports in different settings
▪ Ask about bad things done at school and also crimes committed overall (if
you report lots of bad things at school then you should also report lots of
crime)
o Known groups
▪ Compare groups of offenders to groups of non-offenders and we will hope
to see that the offenders have committed more crimes than the non
offenders
o Official records
▪ Compares self reports to the official reports
▪ Forwards records check
• Take the person’s self report and compare it to the police records
▪ Backwards
• Start with the police records and see if the people on the police
records have reported the crimes they’ve committed on their self
report
- Potential problems with self reports
o Memory
▪ Vary depending on a number of things
• Time frame (harder to give an accurate answer if asked about a
longer period of time (e.g. lifetime)
▪ Telescoping
• Leaving or including out information because you think the crime
happened on a different date.
▪ Not always reliable or accurate
o Interviewer bias
▪ Poorly trained or inexperienced interviewers recording information
inaccurately
o Deception
▪ People aren’t always telling the truth – try to hide their behaviour so they
underreport it or they are trying to exaggerate so they overreport
o Non-comparability
▪ Researchers tend to use all sorts of instruments to get this information
• Asking different sets of questions
• Asking about different time frame
• Asking different groups of people
▪ Without a standardized test, it is hard to compare findings across different
studies
o Fair inference
