Criminal offences recorded by the police are given to the home office to form crime statistics available to the public from the Office of National Statistics, which can show numbers and patterns of offences across various locations. Have a quick look online, what are the crime statistics like in your area? How do these numbers compare to national crime statistics? Self-reports are a form of reporting crime statistics in a certain area.
- This explanation will explore self-report in criminal psychology, which we will define
- Then, we will look at some self-report techniques
- After, we will examine some self-report measures
- Next, we will discuss some self-report psychology advantages and disadvantages
- Finally, we will look into self-report bias
Self-report: Psychology
To find out crime levels and patterns, the frequency of any criminal activity can be looked at for different locations. Crime can be measured by psychologists using both qualitative and quantitative methods, using official statistics or by collecting data using victim or offender self-report surveys. These surveys are known as self-report measures, which can also occur in the form of a focus group or interview. Self-report measures can be defined as:
A method of data collection that requires an individual to give information about themselves or their behaviour, such as their thoughts, feelings and beliefs surrounding a research topic.
In the context of criminal psychology, self-reports are used to gather information from the general public about opinions on criminal activity, victims of crime or offenders in the prison system. This may be a more reliable way of gathering evidence of criminal activity than crime statistics that can be skewed or police reports that have, in the past, been found to be fabricated.
Psychologists can analyse data collected about criminal activity from self-reports, Online survey vector created by vectorjuice - www.freepik.com
Self-report Techniques
As mentioned previously, self-reports can be gathered using any method that encourages a participant to give information about occurrences of criminal activity or themselves, this could be a recollection, opinions and feelings surrounding a specific circumstance, or of crime in general. This data is best collected using:
- Questionnaires or surveys
- Interviews
- Focus groups
- Diary entry
These methods of data collection are flexible in that they can be carried out in person, over the phone, or via online messages, meetings or web pages.
In England and Wales, a telephone-operated crime survey as a method of self-report and statistics from police-reported crimes are used to generate national crime statistics.
The most recent results of this collection of data from The Office for National Statistics¹ (ending in March 2022) show an increase in crimes from March 2021, relating to the lifted restrictions from the pandemic. Although there was no statistically significant increase in total crime, a 20% increase in offences of theft was reported.
Self-report Measures
Measurements used in self-report can depend on the information that psychologists wish to gather from the participant. For instance, to collect quantitative data, related to numbers that can be used for statistical analysis, questions can be included to ask participants to quantify (put a number to) a thought or feeling about the aspect of criminal activity being researched.
Likert scales are a good example of how people can quantify what can be a complex matter to summarise. These are questions or statements that involve 5-point or 7-point response scales.
An example of a 5-point Likert scale for crime research could include a statement such as 'Crime is low in my local area' with response options for participants to choose from including:
5= Strongly agree, 4= Agree, 3= Neither Agree nor Disagree, 2= Disagree, 1= Strongly Disagree.
Self-reports are also useful for gathering more in-depth qualitative data surrounding a topic. During interviews or focus groups, the researcher can ask follow-up questions or for more detail on a response. Plus, if questions or prompts on surveys or diary entries are open-ended, this allows the participant to respond in as much detail as they would like to.
Qualitative data can be useful as responses can be coded for keywords and quantified using their frequency of use. Plus statements can be used as quotes to highlight specific or important examples relating to the research topics.
Data that has been quantified can be easily summarised and presented in a more appealing visual way by using graphs and charts. A common chart used in psychology and by researchers is a bar chart, which could simply show the frequency of different categories of crimes (along the y-axis) committed in a certain area, with each crime category being one bar on the x-axis of the chart.
Self-reports can be a quantitative measure used to analyse a research topic using visual such as bar charts, Image by pch.vector on Freepik
Self-report: Psychology - Advantages & Disadvantages
While measures of self-report do have their advantages, there are several others and also some disadvantages to using self-report to gather crime data.
Advantages include:
- Self-reports are ecologically valid - they measure and can be generalised to real-life settings.
- Data can be collected by survey is both time and cost-effective as large representative samples can be easily reached.
- Self-reports have high reliability, meaning that they can be easily replicated for continuing research.
- As mentioned earlier, results from self-reports can be easily quantified making them easier to summarise and compare visually in a graph or chart.
Disadvantages include:
- Using too many closed or fixed questions in a survey or interview (with yes or no responses) can limit the type of data collected and reduces the validity of the research as people are forced to choose from selected answers, which is not reflective of a real-life response.
- Questions being misinterpreted or misunderstood by participants can reduce the reliability of responses if their answer is not related to the specific question topic.
- There is an issue of introspective ability, that people are subjective and cannot judge themselves, their own character and their actions accurately.
- Acquiescence is another issue with self-reports, it is the phenomenon of participants simply agreeing to statements that they have not read or understood the context of.
- This also links to an aspect of social desirability bias, when people put responses that they believe will make them seem like a good person, which will we discuss more below.
Self-report Bias
Bias in the data collected in self-reports can occur in several different ways, from simply lying about something if they are not sure of a question or 'correct' answer. Specific bias, known as response bias, occurs when people intentionally answer questions in a set way that is misleading. Specific bias can occur if the survey is not designed well, and researchers should try to account for this.
Another type of bias relevant to research is social desirability bias when people intentionally lie in their responses in an attempt to make a good impression of themselves to other participants or the researcher. This can affect data collected, especially in researching criminal activity, as people might overreport and exaggerate what may socially be perceived as 'good' behaviour, and underreport and not go into as much detail with descriptions of behaviour that is typically seen as 'bad' (which probably involves most criminal behaviour).
We can see how underreporting criminal behaviour can impact the statistics on criminal activity, which in turn reduces the credibility of research investigating crime statistics.
Self Report - Key takeaways
- Self-report is a method of data collection that requires an individual to give information about themselves.
- Psychologists can use self-report techniques such as questionnaires, surveys, interviews, focus groups or even diary keeping to gather information about criminal activity from offenders or victims.
Self-report measures can include quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data can be easily summarised and compared visually using bar charts.
Advantages of self-reports include having high reliability and validity and typically time and cost-effective research that can be easily quantified.
Disadvantages of self-reports include that closed or fixed questions can limit responses and that the subjective nature of self-reporting means that people can misunderstand questions or give biased responses.
References
- Crime in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics. (n.d.). Www.ons.gov.uk. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimeinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2022
Explanations 
Exams 
Magazine 
