ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the sample which was drawn as part of the Richmond Youth Project from the 17,500 students entering the eleven public junior and senior high schools of this area in the fall of 1964. It utilizes the data of delinquency from three sources, namely: school records, the questionnaire completed by the students, and police records. A weighting procedure, made possible by computer analysis, involves assigning a weight to cases based on the proportion of the subgroup responding to the questionnaire. Nonresponse is occasionally used as grounds for dismissing the results of questionnaire studies of delinquency: delinquents are so obviously underrepresented among those completing questionnaires that the results need not be taken seriously. Delinquents are consistently less likely than nondelinquents to have completed the questionnaire. There is a relation between the independent variable and the response rate, such that those in the "delinquency-prone" groups are less likely to respond, regardless of their delinquency.
