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IDEOLOGY'S EFFECTS ON BELIEFS ABOUT THE CAUSES OF CRIME AND THE BEST TREATMENT OF CRIMINALS
Abstract
To test the proposition that ideology has effects on criminological beliefs, a telephone survey was conducted. The population sampled was all adults living in the Lincoln, Nebraska, dialing area who have at least one telephone in their home. A total of 225 interviews was completed. Based on past research showing class differences, ideology was conceptualized as two distinct variables--Social Ideology and Economic Ideology. Beliefs about the Causes of Crime and Beliefs about the Best Treatment of Criminals, seen as central to the field of theoretical criminology, were measured with Thurstone scales. Five background variables (Sex, Age, Social Class, Religious Orthodoxy, and Rural/Urban Origin) were included as control variables. The principal hypotheses of this study were that Social Ideology and Economic Ideology have independent causal effects on Beliefs about the Causes of Crime and Beliefs about the Best Treatment of Criminals, and that Beliefs about the Causes of Crime has an independent causal effect on Beliefs about the Best Treatment of Criminals. The results of this study support all five hypotheses. The total effects (zero-order correlations) of each independent variable were all significantly different from zero, and inclusion of the background variables did not reduce the direct effects (standardized multiple regression coefficients) significantly. Social Ideology, especially, had strong total and direct effects on the criminological belief variables. The effects of the background variables on the ideology variables, and especially on the criminological belief variables, were weak. Of all the background variables, only Sex had a significant direct effect on either of the criminological variables--females are more conservative in their beliefs about the causes of crime--but the relative size of this effect is small. The background variables, however, did explain significant amounts of the variations of the ideology variables. As hypothesized, Social Class has a positive direct effect on Social Ideology (the higher the Social Class, the more liberal the Social Ideology), and a negative direct effect on Economic Ideology (the higher the Social Class, the more conservative the Economic Ideology). Age also has strong direct effects on the two ideology variables (older people are more conservative on both), but Rural/Urban Origin, Religious Orthodoxy, and Sex had relatively small and inconsistent effects on the ideology variables.
Subject Area
Criminology
Recommended Citation
COOK, DENNIS GARY, "IDEOLOGY'S EFFECTS ON BELIEFS ABOUT THE CAUSES OF CRIME AND THE BEST TREATMENT OF CRIMINALS" (1980). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8100761.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8100761