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Abstract
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VioLit summary:
OBJECTIVE:
The goal of this article by Andrew was to describe the use of a Violence Index in the study of the extent and degree of violent crime. This index was argued to be a useful tool in evaluation.
METHODOLOGY:
A quasi-experimental method was employed to study 172 delinquents who were affiliated with the California Subsidy Program. Two studies were performed. Study I examined 116 referrals for psychological evaluation within the program between January 1971 and March 1973. Study II examined 56 referrals within the program between April and November 1973. Cases were excluded when there was incomplete data and, in one case, when the crime was reduced by the court to a non-crime. The mean age of all the youth was 17.78 years. The youth were probationers, assigned to the intensive supervision of this program for difficult probationers in the community, and additionally had to be part of the "troublesome" subgroup of the probationer population. Data were collected from their psychological case files. The Violence Scale was developed in the following way. Four professionals (two probation staff and two clinical psychologists, including the author) involved with delinquency ranked a list of each subject's most serious crime in Study I. These rankings were averaged, and a new rank was assigned to each crime. For Study II, the same four professionals took the table derived from Study I and inserted 9 new crimes that were averaged between them. Scores on the scale ranged from very non-serious (smoking) to very serious (voluntary manslaughter). The hypotheses being tested were 1) males would have higher violence scores, 2) non-Anglos would have higher violence scores, and 3) there would be no differences between the two time periods. ANOVA was used to analyze the data.
FINDINGS/DISCUSSION:
Males were found to be significantly more violent in Study I (p<.001), Study II (p<.05), and both studies combined (p<.002). There were no significant differences found between Anglo and non-Anglos. The two time periods did significantly differ with Study II being significantly more violent. There were increases in the violence levels of Anglo women, but an analysis of a gender, ethnic, or combined study interaction revealed no significant interactions. The author explained the closing gap by saying that 1) increasing liberation of women could be encouraging open rather than closed hostility, 2) an unknown aggression-producing factor could be operating more equally than before, and/or 3) changing nature of the family and its differential effect upon male and female delinquency could be factors.
AUTHOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS:
The author concluded that the payoff/risk for keeping the violent delinquent in the community could be improved with improved prognosticating ability. It was also argued that the violence scale could serve as a prototype for future testing; an improvement would be to make the scale a ratio scale rather than an ordinal one. Another improvement, the author suggested, would be the association of psychodiagnostic indices with the degree of violence and identification of "inhibition" and "prevention" variables included. Creation of a pre-violence scale was also advocated.
EVALUATION:
It is a common fact that prior offending best predicts future offending. This article takes this one step further and creates a measurement of the seriousness of this prior offending. Seriousness of crime measures have been around for many years, but at this time (1974), it is very likely that this study's attempt was one of the pioneers. The sample size, while large enough to support the statistics used, is questionable when it comes to generalizability. The data were taken from a specific program in California; more broad-based study would need to be done to make statements about the violent juvenile population in general. The age of the data should also signify caution. Internal validity issues arise in this study in the following areas: 1) clinical files as a data source would contain an unspecifiable variation in its information given many different professionals write these files, and 2) the use of four persons to create the seriousness measure raises caution about the amount of variation that was encountered and how accurate the measure was. The conclusions about the insignificant increase in female seriousness over the time periods are not supported with literature or other data. In fact, the liberation argument has not been supported by data since its emergence in the early 70's. (CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado)
N1 - Call Number: F-461, AB-461
KW - 1970s
KW - California
KW - Survey Instrument
KW - Juvenile Violence
KW - Juvenile Delinquency
KW - Juvenile Crime
KW - Juvenile Offender
KW - Offender Assessment
KW - Delinquency Assessment
KW - Delinquency Prediction
KW - Crime Assessment
KW - Crime Prediction
KW - Violence Assessment
KW - Violence Prediction
Language: en |