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Self-Reported Offending: Reliability and Validity

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Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Synonyms

Concurrent validity; Gender and race differences; Predictive validity; Reliability; Self-reported offending; Self-reported arrests

Overview

Offending is commonly measured by asking people to admit whether they have committed each of a specified number of delinquent acts such as burglary, theft, robbery, assault, and vandalism. A key question is: How reliable and valid are these admissions? Given that people may conceal, exaggerate, or forget their offenses, how accurate are self-reports as a measure of actual delinquent behavior? This entry will focus on self-reported offending (SRO) surveys of large community samples (at least several hundred), to address this question. The extent to which these reports are differentially valid by gender and race will also be explored. There is no space to review self-report surveys of prisoners or the literature on self-reported drug use.

Self-reports of offending have been used for a number of years, initially to uncover “hidden...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Law, University of Greenwich, Old Royal Navy College, London, SE10 9LS, UK

    Darrick Jolliffe

  2. Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, CB3 9DA, Cambridge, UK

    David P. Farrington

Authors
  1. Darrick Jolliffe
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  2. David P. Farrington
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Darrick Jolliffe .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gerben Bruinsma

  2. VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gerben Bruinsma

  3. Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    David Weisburd

  4. Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel

    David Weisburd

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Jolliffe, D., Farrington, D.P. (2014). Self-Reported Offending: Reliability and Validity. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_648

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_648

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-5689-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-5690-2

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