Self-Report Surveys

Types of Self-Reports

Typically, the focus of such self-report studies is on the frequency of crime commission, that is, how many crimes of various types are committed by active offenders over a period of time (Maxfield and Babbie 1995). Most self-report surveys that have been conducted in the United States have been of “captive audiences,” including school or college populations (Hagan 1994).

Another type of self-report survey focuses on the prevalence of crime commission, that is, how many people commit crimes, in contrast to the number of crimes committed by a target population of offenders. Such surveys typically employ samples that represent a broader population, such as households, adult males, or [Page 1466]high school seniors, in contrast to samples of known offenders (Maxfield and Babbie 1995).

There are no nationwide efforts to systematically collect self-report measures of all types of crimes. Instead, a small number of periodic surveys focus on such crimes as delinquency and drug or alcohol use. For example, a continuing study titled Monitoring the Future interviews annual samples of high school seniors. Also, annual self-report surveys of households provide annual estimates of how many people report using different types of illegal drugs (Maxfield and Babbie 1995).

Self-report surveys are probably the best method for trying to measure crimes that are poorly measured by other techniques—crimes such as prostitution and drug abuse; public order crimes and delinquency; and crimes that are rarely reported to the police or observed by police, such as shoplifting and drunk driving (Maxfield and Babbie 1995).

Survey techniques can be used to measure crime by asking people to describe their experience as victims. Self-report surveys of victimization have become commonplace in discussions of crime and criminal justice policy. For example, the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted for the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, has been conducted continuously for twenty-five years and has been the subject of extensive methodological study. The data from victim surveys such as the NCVS helped to substantially change the understanding of crime by including many crimes that were not reported to the police or other criminal justice agencies. These types of surveys also provided more detailed information on crime events than did national data systems based on police records (Cantor and Lynch 2000).

Self-reports are considered the dominant method in criminology for studying the causes of crime. For research topics that seek to explore or explain why people commit criminal, delinquent, or deviant acts, asking questions of those who commit such offenses is currently the best available method (Maxfield and Babbie 1995).

Whereas police-based data show that those who commit crimes in the United States are disproportionately young, male, and black, self-report findings have typically found far less difference among offenders, especially in terms of their social class. Recent selfreport studies show that although lower-class neighborhoods contain a disproportionate amount of violent crime, delinquency as a whole is not concentrated among working-class adolescents. Status offenses (juvenile offenses such as truancy and curfew violation) and property crime, in particular, are evenly distributed throughout the class structure (Bierne and Messerschmidt 2000).

...