Crime, Deviance and Methods: Self-report Questionnaire

Opportunities for students to link crime, deviance and research methods in a practical way are often limited by the constraints of time and space – but one simple approach that can be used effectively in the classroom is a self-report crime questionnaire. Although there are a few of these kicking around (from Ann Campbell’s onward…) this is a relatively recent one I’ve put together based on questions contained in the UK Crime and Justice Survey.

It can be downloaded as a Word document so that you can amend it easily (you may not want to include all the 40+ questions and you may want to substitute some of your own…). 

I have, for example, marked some of the more problematic questions (such as “Have you made a false insurance claim, deliberately added items or increased the value of items on a claim”) in brown ink. If you want to keep them, just change the ink colour. If you think they’re likely to be irrelevant to your students, just delete and / or replace the questions accordingly.

The document suggests some possible classroom uses for the questionnaire – from data and methodological analysis if you’re leaning toward research methods to using the data to think critically about official crime statistics based on categories like age and gender.