John MacDonald - Measuring Crime and Criminality

Measuring Crime
& Criminality

Advances in Criminological Theory

Volume 17

John MacDonald

editor

First published 2011 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Copyright 2011 by Taylor & Francis.

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ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-1481-2 (hbk)

ISSN: 0894-2366

Contents

, John M. MacDonald

, Terence P. Thornberry and Marvin D. Krohn

, John M. MacDonald, Andrew Morral, and Alex R. Piquero

, John K. Roman

, Ralph B. Taylor

, Andrew V. Papachristos

, Candice L. Odgers and Michael A. Russell

, Charles F. Manski and Daniel S. Nagin

, Geoffrey C. Barnes and Jordan M. Hyatt

, David S. Kirk

, Christopher J. Sullivan and Alex R. Piquero

, Shawn D. Bushway and Raymond Paternoster

, Ojmarrh Mitchell

John M. MacDonald

In the early 1960s, Thorsten Sellin and Marvin Wolfgang set out on an ambitious research agenda to promote a more accurate measurement of the crime rate, culminating in a psychophysical scale for the seriousness of criminal offenses and their publication The Measurement of Delinquency (Sellin and Wolfgang, 1964). This pioneering work, along with Wolfgang and colleagues subsequent The National Survey of Crime Severity (Wolfgang et al., 1985), provided the most comprehensive assessment of how to measure the severity of criminal offenses from normative ratings. Yet prominent scholars questioned the adequacy of this normative ranking approach for understanding the etiology of individual offending careers, its reliance on only official crime definitions, and the assumption that the seriousness scores could be added together.

Over the past four decades, criminology has adapted many other measurement approaches from the behavioral and social sciences in an attempt to gain greater theoretical leverage for understanding criminal behavior. Self-report survey methods are now commonly used to collect measures of crime perpetration and victimization. The self-report approach to measuring crime now plays a center stage in tests of criminological theory. Criminology has also advanced with the development of statistical models and methods of inference used to estimate various treatment effects.

To introduce this volume, we need to first ask the following: How has our understanding of core issues of criminology changed from the various approaches to measuring crime and relevant theoretical constructs and tools of statistical inference? In this volume, scholars explore the potential benefits that different measurement and methods of statistical inference hold for understanding key criminological questions, examine what has been learned from the application of different approaches, and discuss other insights on how to improve measurement and methods for advancing core questions of criminological inquiry.

As the serving editor of this volume, it is my hope that these chapters help illustrate how understanding the measurement properties of criminal behavior and different approaches to estimating treatment effects is useful for developing theoretical insights on the causes of crime. There are plenty of excellent edited books and specialty journals that discuss issues of measurement and methods in other allied fields, but no thematic overview of these issues in criminology has been published for decades.

The purpose of criminological theories is to explain why some people engage in criminal behavior. Criminologists have adopted a wide range of theoretical perspectivesfrom genetic models that emphasize biosocial factors to more macro-sociological perspectives that examine neighborhood or societal factorsto address the core objective of explaining variation in crime between people and places. Criminological research has used a variety of research designs including the examination of administrative and self-report data, cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys, experimental designs, counterfactual approaches to causality, and the use of meta-analysis. These approaches are discussed in this volume. Before discussing these approaches, this volume focuses on the validity of the measurement of criminal behavior. Thornberry and Krohns chapter explains how valid information on measuring criminal behavior is at the heart of how the science of criminology can progress, and the benefits of the self-report method. An often overlooked issue in the measurement of criminal behavior and related constructs is the effects of socially desirable response bias in the questions of surveys. MacDonald, Morral, and Piquero in their chapter discuss this problem for testing criminological theories with self-report surveys and provide a case study of socially desirable response bias in tests of Gottfredson and Hirschis theory of self-control.

Beyond the issues of validity and reliability in the measurement of crime, there is also the need to have useful measures of crime severity and its social impact. Romans chapter discusses the emerging literature developed in economics that estimates crime seriousness in monetized terms. In addition to providing an excellent summary of the economic approach to estimating crime severity and its logic, Roman provides a new method for estimating the severity of crimes using costs of criminal victimization. This entry is both novel and necessary if criminological theories are going to be advanced with any insight into practical value for public policy. I see this approach as a useful advancement of the normative ranking approaches developed in the 1960s by Sellin and Wolfgang.

Blending measurement and methods together, several chapters discuss issues that should be of fundamental interest to criminological endeavors. Taylor discusses why empirical tests of community-level theories of crime suffer from deficits in the conceptualization and measurement of key environmental constructs. Taylor provides a partial remedy for this problem by outlining an approach to construct validation of key measures of community-level attributes and their link to criminal behavior. Taylor suggests the use of a particular metamodel, a BoudonColeman diagram, capturing macro-to-micro, micro-to-micro, and micro-to-macro processes. Communities and crime scholars would be wise to read this chapter carefully for unique and important insights. Building on the issue of measurement and methods for testing core theories of criminology, Papachristos provides a thorough overview of the application of social network analysis to test criminological theories. In doing so, Papachristos provides a framework for how criminologists might conceptualize and employ social network analysis in their own work. Given the growing use of social network analysis in a variety of fields, this chapter is a welcome and necessary contribution. While criminologists may have missed the boat on the use of social network analysis, hopefully the field will embrace this approach where it is applicable and catch up with allied social sciences. Neuroscience is also playing an increasing role in all fields of study. Criminology is not immune to this trend. Odgers and Russell in their chapter note that genes play an important role in shaping human traits, including the propensity to commit antisocial behavior and crime. These authors provide a convincing review of the literature and suggested methodological approaches for gaining greater theoretical leverage on the geneenvironment role in explaining criminal behavior. They are clear in noting that genetically informative research has yet to reach a point where it can be useful for prediction models. But they show how there are a number of important ways in which findings from geneenvironment studies can be used in research designs to show the importance of environmental stimuli in the etiology of crime. This review chapter provides one with greater hope that biological measures can be integrated more clearly into models of crime and not be seen as competing explanations for criminal behavior derived from social or psychological theories.