Self-Report Studies, Essay Example

Introduction

Many people participate in National Crime Surveys and do this from the perspective of confidentiality and anonymity.  This on the basis of being able to complete the questionnaires from a degree of honesty and validity.  Reality is that many of the people who respond to these surveys cannot be fully relied upon and will not admit to having carried out any criminal acts , particularly where such people may already have a criminal record.

Theory of Self Concept

Most people like to consider themselves as honest citizens.  A lot of people have both drinking and substance abuse issues often border lining acts of criminal behaviour.  Regardless of this people consider their private lives to be just that i.e. private!   If survey questions are not pitched right they can be viewed as both offensive and an invasion of privacy and will most likely provoke a dishonest response. The greatest threat to drug users is that of isolation from society, being stigmatised and ultimately criminalised.  This approach is punishment based and what we really need to accomplish in order to address the problem is to examine this from a societal perspective as an illness. Many are involved in recreational drugs like marijuana and will not disclose such habits to the public via surveys or questionnaires.

The psychological perspective of honesty has been defined as “honesty results from the active resistance of temptation, comparable to the controlled cognitive processes that enable the delay of reward” (Greene, J.D. 2012).   In summary, the concept of honesty and dishonesty in self-report studies  has no real tangible way to determine if a person is telling the truth. As such the results cannot be fully relied upon in isolation from other studies.  There may also be gender differences in terms of reliability of reporting between that of male and females. (Practical Research Assessment and Evaluation, 2002).

References

Joshua D. Greene, 1. a. (2012). Patterns of neural activity associated with honest and dishonest moral decisions. National Acadamy of Science.

Practical Research Assessment and Evaluation. (2002). Male and female differences in self-report cheating. Practical Research Assessment and Evaluation.