Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 9, 293295 1999 Whurr Publishers Ltd

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Editorial Validity of self-reported delinquency

Offending is commonly measured by asking people to admit whether they have committed each of a specified number of delinquent acts such as shoplifting, burglary, assault, vandalism and marijuana use. In using selfreported delinquency (SRD) measures, it is essential to establish their validity. Given that people may conceal, exaggerate or forget their offences, how accurate is SRD as a measure of actual delinquent behaviour? Surprisingly, this question has rarely been addressed, possibly because of pressure from funding agencies to obtain substantive results (e.g. on the prevalence and frequency of offending or on correlations with explanatory variables) rather than to carry out methodological research. Nevertheless, methodological research (especially on validity) is vital, to establish how much confidence can be placed in substantive results. Incidentally, this applies equally to other information obtained by self-reports, such as on victimization; very few studies of the validity of self-reports of victimization have ever been carried out, despite the widespread reliance on victimization surveys for information about crime rates and trends in crime rates. Historically, most delinquency research prior to the 1960s was based on official records of offending. Then, the influential research of Short and Nye (1957) triggered the self-report revolution, leading many (especially American) researchers to abandon official records in favour of self-reports. Even in the 1990s, I have been criticized by American researchers for using convictions to measure offending, on the grounds that convictions are hopelessly biased and incomplete and that SRD provides the only accurate measure of offending. Why did the self-report revolution come about? Was it because SRD really is a better measure? Or was it perhaps because self-reports showed lower correlations than official records between offending and variables such as race, class and gender, which were more palatable to liberally minded criminologists and confirmed their belief that official processing was biased? A reasonable conclusion is that both SRD and official records (as well as other measures such as parent, teacher and peer ratings and systematic observation) are useful as measures of offending. However, it is important to assess

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the value of all measuring instruments on traditional psychometric criteria such as questionnaire content, administration procedures, norms for various populations, internal consistency, retest stability, and concurrent and predictive validity. I was the first researcher to evaluate SRD measures on all these criteria (Farrington, 1973), and generally they came out pretty well, suggesting that it is perfectly defensible to use self-reports in measuring delinquency. In the early days of the use of SRD measures, in the 1960s and 1970s, there were quite a few studies of reliability and validity. The zenith of methodological research on SRD was reached by the publication of Measuring Delinquency by Hindelang et al. in 1981. They basically concluded that SRD measures were valid and that (with one important exception) the correlates of official and self-reported delinquency were the same. The important exception was race; Black:White differences were far greater in official records. According to Hindelang et al. (1981), the most common reasons put forward to explain this discrepancy were that the police and courts were biased against Blacks, that the validity of SRD was lower for Blacks (who concealed more), or that delinquent Blacks were disproportionately missing from survey samples. Unfortunately, the landmark book by Hindelang et al. (1981) tended to kill methodological research on SRD stone dead. Delinquency researchers concluded that the validity of self-reports had been established for all time, and the method became even more dominant in the 1980s and 1990s. More and more ambitious studies were carried out, including multi-site longitudinal studies and cross-national comparative studies (Klein, 1989; Junger-Tas et al., 1994; Weitekamp and Kerner, 1994), to a large extent without methodological research on reliability and validity. (For a review of SRD research on reliability and validity up to the present, see Farrington et al., 1996.) Given this historical background, the paper published in this issue by Mons Bendixen and Dan Olweus should be welcomed. They report on the development of a new SRD measure specially devised for early adolescents (age 1114), with due concern for psychometric criteria such as reliability and validity. They grapple with important problems, for example the difficulties caused for traditional measures such as product-moment correlations by the fact that SRD is highly skewed (since the majority of children are relatively law-abiding while a few are highly delinquent). Another difficult problem is the applicability of retest stability measures to a construct which is in reality changing (because children are committing more and more offences over time). My conclusion is that, notwithstanding 40 years of SRD research, all projects based on self-reports need a validity check against some external criterion, such as official records. It is important to assess the methodological quality of all studies, not only according to reliability and validity but also according to other criteria such as sample size and of attrition subjects. All studies are

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not equally good and all studies should not be given equal weight in drawing conclusions in criminology! David P. Farrington Institute of Criminology University of Cambridge References
Farrington DP (1973) Self-reports of deviant behaviour: predictive and stable? Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 64: 99110. Farrington DP, Loeber R, Stouthamer-Loeber M, van Kammen WB, Schmidt L (1996) Selfreported delinquency and a combined delinquency seriousness scale based on boys, mothers and teachers: concurrent and predictive validity for African-Americans and Caucasians. Criminology 34: 493517. Hindelang MJ, Hirschi T, Weis JG (1981) Measuring Delinquency. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Junger-Tas J, Terlouw GJ, Klein MW (Eds) (1994) Delinquent Behaviour among Young People in the Western World. Amsterdam: Kugler. Klein MW (Ed.) (1989) Cross-National Research in Self-Reported Crime and Delinquency. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer. Short JF, Nye FI (1957) Reported behaviour as a criterion of deviant behaviour. Social Problems 5: 207213. Weitekamp EGM, Kerner HJ (Eds) (1994) Cross-National Longitudinal Research on Human Development and Criminal Behaviour. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer.