Social Status and Self-Reported CriminalityAuthor(s): Gwynn NettlerSource: Social Forces, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Sep., 1978), pp. 304-305Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2577642 .

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Social Status and

Self-Reported Criminality

GWYNN NETTLER, University of Alberta

Tittle and Villemez's study of the relation between social status and self- reported criminality draws strong conclusions from weak data. Their six- item measure of criminal activity "over the past five years" (!) has no known reliability or validity. It is no test of the validity of verbal responses to show, as do Tittle and Villemez, that people confess to more crime than is reported to the police.

Tittle and Villemez's use of questions to assess bad actions suffers from all the well-documented deficiencies of this procedure:

1. As in most such surveys, peccadilloes dominate serious crimes and the gravity of each admitted offense is unreported and unknown.

2. Memory is fallible and fallibility may itself be class-linked. 3. Words mean different things to different people, and particularly

to people who live in separate social worlds. Thus to ask how many times in the past five years one has "gambled illegally," "cheated on income tax," and "physically harmed somebody on purpose" is to assume a constant referent of such activities among disparate individuals. Since most people know little about the criminal laws with which they live, it is doubtful whether they can tell an interviewer how many times they have gambled illegally. I for one could not. Similarly, how much "physical harm" is sufficient to bother recalling, and how much deceit constitutes "cheating" the tax collector, probably vary widely among classes of respondent.

Tittle and Villemez acknowledge some of the deficiencies of verbal reports as measures of actions, yet they persist with weak justifications of this common usage. Investigators who would substitute interrogation for observation owe their readers better assurance of the reliability and meaning of the verbalizations they gather.

On a minor point, Tittle and Villemez say that they could find only two self-report studies of adult criminal conduct. If self-reference may be pardoned, my early report is a third such study that employs a better procedure-albeit an imperfect one-for asking people about their mis- deeds.

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Commentary / 305

References

Nettler, G. 1959. "Antisocial Sentiment and Criminality." American Sociological Re- viezv 24(April):202-08.

Tittle, C. R. and W. J. Villemez. 1977. "Social Class and Criminality." Social Forces 56(December):474-502.

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