Adolescents' Legality Representations and Crime Reporting

Abstract

The present study primarily focused on the appraisals that nearly 4000 middle school and high school students made of crimes or unlawful acts they hypothetically witnessed. The key appraisal dimensions were concerned with students' evaluation of the legality and acceptability of the crimes and unlawful acts, and with the evaluation of the personal concerns, emotional consequences for the self, and potential benefits for the victims that would accrue from filing and not filing a police report for the crimes. Students also evaluated the probability of filing a police report, if the situation actually occurred. The primary goal of the study was to examine the general hypothesis that adolescents' willingness to file a police report would be directly affected by their appraisals. It was also hypothesized that these appraisals, in turn, would mediate any effect exerted by adolescents' personal levels of antisocial or aggressive behaviors and prosocial behavior, as well as by their personal views about socially accepted codes of conduct. The findings of structural equation modeling confirmed the tenets of these guiding hypotheses.

Keywords:

• adolescence
• decision-making
• psychological assessment
• crime scene behavior
• law enforcement officers

Notes

1. In both groups, the scenarios were developed and formulated by also manipulating the level of personal acquaintance between the bystander and perpetrator/victim, as well as the type of unlawful acts. The present investigation does not address these situational differences and exclusively relies on data aggregated across scenarios, since one of its primary focuses was the measurement of reliable individual differences in adolescents' appraisals of crime or unlawful acts.

2. Example of high-school scenario: ‘Manuel, a boy whom you have known since elementary school, still lives in your neighborhood. One night, without being seen, you see him approaching a well-dressed man on the street. Suddenly, you see Manuel putting on a mask and then threatening the man with a knife. You see the man giving his wallet and watch to Manuel. Manuel runs away leaving the man shocked and scared’.

3. Details of these factor analyses are available from the authors upon request.

4. Considering the presence of statistically significant, albeit small, gender differences in mean scores on the variables of interest, we also conducted a series of SEM multiple-group analyses across gender groups. These analyses examined whether there would be systematic gender differences in the multivariate relations regulating adolescents' crime reporting, as hypothesized in the general SEM model. The results of these analyses overall showed no systematic differences in the effects in male and female adolescents for both middle and high school students. Details of these analyses are available from the authors upon request.

5. SEM analyses were performed using AMOS v.7. The details concerning the measurement models utilized for the SEM analyses in both groups are available from the authors upon request.