Abstract
Earlier sweeps of the International Self Report Delinquency Survey (ISRD) made no attempt to cover teenagers’ attitudes towards criminal justice institutions. ISRD3 goes a little way to filling this gap by including a short suite of questions on trust in the police and perceptions of police legitimacy, that sets out to see if well-established insights into adults’ attitudes, built on procedural justice theory, also hold true for teenagers. Results are presented in this chapter. To anticipate our conclusions, the results very largely reflect those that have emerged internationally for adult samples: that trust in procedural justice is a precondition for legitimacy, reducing preparedness to break the law, and that the quality of teenagers’ experience of the police is a clear determinant of their trust in the police.
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Notes
- 1.
Most of the chapters in this book focus on the five UPYC countries, counting the United Kingdom as a single country. In this chapter we have treated England and Scotland as different countries, for reasons explained below.
- 2.
Conceptualizations of what legitimacy actually means vary widely amongst studies (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012; Hough, 2013; Hough et al., 2014, 2017; Jackson & Bradford, 2010; Jackson & Gau, 2016; Johnson et al., 2014; Reisig, Bratton, & Gertz, 2007; Tankebe, Reisig, & Wang, 2016; Tyler, 2003; Tyler & Jackson, 2013) with some even including forms of trust (like procedural justice) as dimensions of legitimacy (Gau, 2011, 2015; Gau et al., 2012; Murphy, 2015; Reisig et al., 2007; Tankebe, 2013; Tankebe et al., 2016). Hough, Jackson &Bradford (2010, p. 333) clearly differentiate between trust and legitimacy by stating that “[t]rust is believing that the police have the right intentions and are competent to do what they are tasked to do; legitimacy is recognizing and justifying police power and authority” (see also Jackson & Gau, 2016).
- 3.
At the time of writing this chapter, data on the procedural justice module was available for 27 countries, counting England and Scotland as two separate countries. The final number is expected to be around 35.
- 4.
- 5.
The Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 put stop and search on a statutory basis and introduced a requirement for a code of practice.
- 6.
They were adapted from the “trust in justice” module of the 2010 European Social Survey (cf. Jackson et al., 2011). Constraints of space in the questionnaire limited the number of items that we could include.
- 7.
Formative and reflective measures differ with respect to the assumed direction of causality between measures and constructs (for a good summary, see Jarvis, MacKenzie, & Podsakoff, 2003). Reflective measures assume that respondents’ orientation towards the underlying construct determines the answers they give to the questionnaire, so that the different items are taken as interchangeable and high correlations between them are expected. By contrast, formative measures assume that the answers given to the items in the questionnaire form the underlying construct. In this case the items cease to be interchangeable and low correlations may be expected. For a more extended discussion regarding the use of formative and reflective measures within the procedural justice framework (see Jackson et al., 2015; Bradford et al., 2017).
- 8.
To deal with the fact that variables included in the construction of a given formative measure may have different number of answer categories (see Box 7.1), all individual items are standardized into percentage of maximum possible (POMP) before creating the scales (see Cohen, Cohen, Aiken, & West, 1999). The logic behind POMP values is explained best through an example. If a variable has four answer categories, then in the transformed POMP variable the first answer category would be converted into zero, the second one into 33.3, the third one into 66.6 and the fourth one into 100. When forming a row mean scale out of two variables, again with four answer categories each, then someone answering both questions with value four would become a POMP value of 100 in the scale, and someone giving for both questions the value one would get the POMP value zero. Someone answering one of these questions with two and the other with three would get a POMP value of (33.3 + 66.6)/2, i.e. about 50.
The construction of the general formative measures of trust and legitimacy needs further explanation. To keep the weight of the dimensions the same in the construction of the general trust and legitimacy scales, first the average value of the dimensions with more than one item is estimated (i.e. procedural fairness in the case of trust and moral alignment in the case of legitimacy) and then an average scale is estimated using the raw items (transformed into POMP values) for dimensions represented by only one question and the previously estimated scales for the dimensions with more than one item in the questionnaire. In this way each dimension gets the same weight in the final scales.
- 9.
Self-control is included in this chapter as a simple row mean scale, i.e. as a formative measure, in all models including controls. The self-control scale is included in the ISRD3 official dataset under the “selfc” name.
- 10.
It is of course very unlikely that the police would be involved if such behaviour in school came to light, though at least in UK law, it would constitute the offence of fraud by false representation under section “Methods” of the 2006 Fraud Act.
- 11.
In the structural equation model in section “Effect of Dimensions of Trust on Legitimacy Amongst the 6 UPYC Countries”, intention to offend is a reflective measure.
- 12.
These estimates are not shown and come from the same regressions as in Fig. 7.4 but without country interactions.
- 13.
The stop and search module includes two more questions about the experienced procedural fairness in the last contact with police (i.e. whether the police officers were professional and whether they were fair, see question 12.4 in Box 7.2). The results are qualitatively the same with the other two items measuring procedural fairness (results not shown and available upon request).
- 14.
The research project “Police and Adolescents in Multiethnic Societies” or POLIS is also a good example dealing with adolescents from Germany and France (see Oberwittler & Roché, 2013).
- 15.
As wisely stated by Kohn in his influential presidential address at the American Sociological Association 30 years ago (Kohn, 1987, p. 720): “when one finds cross-national similarities despite differences in research design, even despite defects in some of the studies, it is unlikely that the similar findings were actually produced by the methodological differences”.
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Farren, D., Hough, M., Murray, K., McVie, S. (2018). Trust in the Police and Police Legitimacy Through the Eyes of Teenagers. In: Roché, S., Hough, M. (eds) Minority Youth and Social Integration. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89462-1_7
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