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Self-Reported Delinquency of High School Students

In: Social Issues

Submitted By mayumirix
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Gutierrez and Shoemaker – Self-Reported Delinquency of High School Students

Upon going through the study, the first thing I noticed was the small sample size. Only gathering data from nine schools throughout Metro Manila wouldn’t really give a reliable result. Although the findings do coincide with those of other studies, I still feel that more information could’ve been derived with a bigger sample size.

The second thing that I noticed was the downfall of the method of self-reporting. I do understand that the researchers wanted to gather information on cases not usually declared in court, I think the method itself of self-reporting skews the results a bit, especially for a sociological research. Overall, more students declared covert cases than overt ones. I do agree with the study that the youth feel the pressures of parents and authoritative figures which is why they would avoid doing such crimes. But at the same time, the very nature of over crimes makes students prone to fake their answers. The problem with self-reports is that you rely solely on the credibility of the proponent, when in fact some issues such as faking good or bad, sabotage, etc. occur. Relating this to the crimes, maybe the reason why the result showed these crimes at lower rates was because society sees these crimes and bad and unacceptable. Because of the negative connotation, as a test subject, the individual has the tendency to disagree to committing such crimes.

With this, I would think that the individual would then admit to the covert crimes since out of the two it is the “lesser evil”. The crimes that rated the highest were those that seemed the most “okay” or the least grave crimes out of the bunch. It would seem unrealistic as a test subject to disagree to committing all the crimes, and instead would admit only to the lesser crimes. The social concept of the gravity of crimes then affects the individual and gives him/her the reason to say that he/she did not commit certain crimes. I agree that delinquency is more related to social than psychological factors, but the very method of collecting the information, through a self-report, is more related to psychological factors that social. This therefore skews the data and paints supposedly social data with psychological factors. As such, dealing with sociological research should be careful with the mode that it uses. Quantitative data is definitely a good way to back-up theories and discover sociological problems, just as long as it is not manipulated by the individual (in this case the individual taking the survey).

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