ABSTRACT
The aim of this final chapter is to make some assessment of the achievements of this study. But first it is important to recall the limitations of the evidence adduced. A great deal of it is statistical, but the statistics of motoring offences have been shown to be peculiarly confusing, and they do not present a completely objective and reliable picture. Nor, by the strictest standards of social investigation, are the police records as objective as a research worker would like; they rarely included the full case for the defence, they relied greatly on the impressions of witnesses, and they were concerned more with the circumstances of the offence than with the personal characteristics of the offender. It was therefore necessary to make inferences about the offenders from a distance, and although the credibility of these inferences was checked by interview, the subjects seen were not the same persons as those in the documentary study; moreover, the sample of forty-three was too small to be a satisfactory check.
