ABSTRACT
The measurement of antisocial, delinquent, and criminal behavior is among the most critical of all issues within criminology. Without reliable and valid estimates of central theoretical processes and outcomes, researchers’ conclusions may be compromised. Very early criminological research relied on official records, but subsequent analyses in the middle part of the 20th century confirmed the existence of a large amount of crime that went undetected or un-processed by the criminal justice system. The self-report methodology was developed to circumvent that problem. This chapter provides an overview of measuring individual behaviors with self-reports, using self-reported delinquency as the specific case study. I begin with the ground-breaking work of Short and Nye, highlighting how their work has had a lasting and pivotal impact on the entire field of criminology, and how my own work has been intimately influenced by their research.
