Attitudes toward crime(s) and their relations to gender, age, and personal values

Abstract

People's attitudes toward crimes and how they are related to gender, age, and personal values are studied here based on data from six representative surveys with altogether 14,591 respondents collected in four German cities between 1998 and 2020. The respondents rated fourteen legal offenses such as fare dodging, tax fraud, and car breaking on a “badness” scale. As predicted, women rate all offenses harsher than men and show more agreement in their ratings. As people grow older, their badness ratings rise monotonically in a decelerating way toward an upper asymptote. Exceptions are the youngest cohorts: They have relatively negative attitudes toward petty crimes (pot smoking, fare dodging), leading to initial dips in the growth curves. Personal values, in particular peoples’ striving for conservation, predict people's badness ratings, most effectively for petty crimes, and independent of gender and age. In all age and gender sub-groups, crime-specific attitudes are positively inter-correlated, showing that there is a common underlying attitude object. The structure of the badness items exhibits two dimensions, with highly similar configurations for all age and gender cohorts.