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Scaling Criminal Offending

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Abstract

Objective:

This paper reviews a century of research on creating theoretically meaningful and empirically useful scales of criminal offending and illustrates their strengths and weaknesses.

Methods:

The history of scaling criminal offending is traced in a detailed literature review focusing on the issues of seriousness, unidimensionality, frequency, and additivity of offending. Modern practice in scaling criminal offending is measured using a survey of 130 articles published in five leading criminology journals over a two-year period that included a scale of individual offending as either an independent or dependent variable. Six scaling methods commonly used in contemporary criminological research are demonstrated and assessed using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979: dichotomous, frequency, weighted frequency, variety, summed category, and item response theory ‘theta’.

Results:

The discipline of criminology has seen numerous scaling techniques introduced and forgotten. While no clearly superior method dominates the field today, the most commonly used scaling techniques are dichotomous and frequency scales, both of which are fraught with methodological pitfalls including sensitivity to the least serious offenses.

Conclusions:

Variety scales are the preferred criminal offending scale because they are relatively easy to construct, possess high reliability and validity, and are not compromised by high frequency non-serious crime types.

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Notes

  1. The relationship between Elliott and Ageton’s (1980) sub-scales and their total delinquency frequency scale is not clear. Based on their first table, for whites, the sum of the frequencies of the sub-scales is greater than the total delinquency frequency (49.70 vs. 46.79) whereas for blacks the opposite is true (68.11 vs. 79.20).

  2. Later work (Elliott et al. 1985, 1989) employed summated response category scales despite their earlier recommendation to use frequency scales (Osgood et al. 2002b).

  3. In multi-level studies, only the individual level was coded.

  4. Scales of victimization and scales comprised exclusively of substance use were not included.

  5. Crime & Delinquency had the highest proportion of qualifying articles with 69%, followed by Journal of Quantitative Criminology (59%), Justice Quarterly (57%), Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency (48%), and Criminology (46%). According to a Chi-square test, these differences are not statistically significant (p = .16).

  6. As described to the respondents, the 17 items are: purposely damaged or destroyed property that did not belong to you; gotten into a physical fight at school or work; taken something from a store without paying for it; other than from a store, taken something not belonging to you worth under $50; other than from a store, taken something not belonging to you worth $50 or more; used force or strong arm methods to get money or things from a person; hit or seriously threatened to hit someone; attacked someone with the idea of seriously hurting or killing them; smoked marijuana or hashish (‘pot,’ ‘grass,’ ‘hash’); used any drugs or chemicals to get high or for kicks, except marijuana; sold marijuana or hashish; sold hard drugs such as heroin, cocaine, or lsd; tried to get something by lying to a person about what you would do for him, that is, tried to con someone; taken a vehicle for a ride or drive without the owner’s permission; broken into a building or vehicle to steal something or just to look around; knowingly sold or held stolen goods; helped in a gambling operation, like running numbers or policy or books.

  7. These responses are coded 0 through 6, respectively, for the summed response category scales.

  8. Weights for the weighted frequency scales were drawn from Wolfgang et al.’s (1985) report, consistent with the interpretations of two papers in the review that used seriousness weights (Kazemian and Le Blanc 2007; King et al. 2007).

  9. Conclusions regarding the sensitivity of scales may vary with different model specifications.

  10. Osgood et al. (2002b) recommend using Tobit regression with theta scales. This was explored in the current analysis, but not presented. First, the assumptions of the Tobit model were not met. A Cragg model was more appropriate (Smith and Brame 2003). Second, all of the regression-adjusted differences from logit, negative binomial and Poisson models were easily obtainable from standard ordinary least squares models, so the OLS approach was used for theta scales since they are more suited to OLS than the other scales.

  11. These results are available upon request.

  12. As one reviewer pointed out, in order to use Sellin and Wolfgang’s (1964) scaling method as originally formulated, criminal event data must be used. The weighted frequency scale is evaluated in this paper because this is how Sellin-Wolfgang weights are used in criminological research today. It is possible that an individual-level scale of offending based on summed event seriousness from self-reported criminal events would not exhibit the same problems as the weighted frequency scale. However, to my knowledge, this type of scale has not be attempted in the literature, and there is no reason to expect this scale would dramatically differ from the weighted frequency (but see Wolfgang et al. (1985, 11) for a critique of the related aggregate weighted frequency rate (Blumstein, 1974).

  13. Estimation error is also a problem in propensity score matching (Heckman et al. 1998) and analysis based on group-based trajectory models (Nagin 2005), where it is often dealt with using bootstrapping.

  14. The magnitude of the correlation between variety and frequency of offending is remarkably similar in Monahan and Piquero (2009) and the current study. Calculating the correlation at nine different ages using a contemporary juvenile offender based sample, they obtained estimates ranging from 0.60 to 0.73. This study found the correlation to be 0.66 in a population sample from 1980.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Erin Sweeten, Shawn Bushway, Denise Gottfredson, John Laub, Ray Paternoster, Mike Reisig, Scott Decker, the editors of this journal, and three anonymous reviewers for valuable guidance in the development of this paper.

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  1. School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Arizona State University, 411 N Central Ave Suite 600, MC: 4420, Phoenix, AZ, 85004-0685, USA

    Gary Sweeten

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Correspondence to Gary Sweeten.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 7.

Table 7 Item parameters from graded response model
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Sweeten, G. Scaling Criminal Offending. J Quant Criminol 28, 533–557 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-011-9160-8

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