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CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
Concern about young people and youth crime is nothing
new - as a number of academic commentators have noted (see,
for example, Pearson, 1983, and Muncie, 2004), it has been
a recurrent theme in Britain for at least the past hundred
years - but the intensity of recent political and media
debate around such issues remains striking. Implicit in
these debates are assumptions about public attitudes
towards 'young people today' - after all, when politicians
refer to 'yob culture' or the erosion of 'respect', they do
so in the belief that they are articulating the views of
the majority. And yet surprisingly little is actually known
(rather than assumed) about public attitudes in this area.
While it is possible to find a wealth of survey evidence
about attitudes towards crime in general (largely generated
by the British and Scottish Crime Surveys), research that
focuses specifically on views of young people and youth
crime is largely absent.
As part of the 2004 Scottish Social Attitudes survey,
the Scottish Executive funded a module aimed at exploring
adult views of 'young people', with particular reference to
youth crime. More specifically, the module addressed the
following questions:
- How much contact is there between young people and
other sections of the population?
- Do problems associated with young people and youth
crime figure prominently in adults' accounts of the
main problems facing their communities?
- What are the main themes in the way that young
people are viewed by adults?
- What are the main features of adult perceptions of
and anxieties about youth crime and disorder, and to
what extent are such views grounded in experience?
What do we mean by young people?
Although the term 'young people' is commonplace and is
intuitively understood, there is no obvious definition of
the age groups it includes. For this module, we chose to
focus on those between the ages of 11 and 24, which early
piloting work suggested was consistent with most public
understandings of the term. For some of the questions,
though, we addressed 11 to 15 year-olds and 16-24 year-olds
separately. The reason for this distinction is that the
issues relating to 11 to 15 year-olds (hanging around the
streets, truancy, vandalism, etc.) are very different from
those affecting the older age group (more serious drug and
alcohol use, late-night disorder and violence, more serious
offending). Moreover, the circumstances of the two groups
tend to be rather different - the former typically still
living at home and attending school; the latter entering
the job market or higher/further education and often having
left the family home.
As a side note, it is worth noting that, although this
age group as a whole looms large in popular imagination, it
actually accounted for just 18% of Scotland's population in
2003 - down from 23% in 1985. In simple numerical terms,
young people are actually increasingly overshadowed by
older people - those aged 60 and over currently account for
around 20% of Scotland's population. By 2020, those aged
11-16 are likely to account for no more than around 15% of
the population; and those aged 60 + for nearer 30% (
GRO, 2005). Thinking forwards 10 or 20
years, this may well have implications for
inter-generational contact and conflict; for overall views
of young people; and for the construction of the problem of
youth crime.
Structure of the report
The report has the following broad structure. The
remainder of this introductory chapter provides some
background information about the
SSA and the reporting conventions used
in the analysis. Chapter 2 examines briefly the nature and
extent of contact between young people and different
sections of the adult population. In subsequent sections,
this analysis is drawn upon in order to explore the
hypothesis that negative views of young people are
associated with low levels of direct personal contact.
Chapter 3 looks at the extent to which issues relating to
young people feature in adults' accounts of the main
problems facing their communities - in other words, at
whether the current media and political focus on young
people and youth crime is mirrored in public attitudes.
Chapter 4 looks at general adult perceptions of younger
people, and in particular at the extent to which such views
can be characterised as positive or negative. Chapter 5
focuses specifically on the issue of youth crime and
disorder and explores public perceptions of, anxieties
about and experience of such behaviour. Finally, Chapter 6
summarises the main themes emerging from the research and
discusses their implications for how we understand the
'problem of youth crime'.
Each chapter starts by stating the key questions
addressed within it. This is followed by an introduction
which provides a brief overview of the topic matter and
presents the survey questions on which the analysis is
based. A set of key points highlighting the main findings
can be found at the end of each chapter.
The Scottish Social Attitudes survey
series
The
Scottish Social Attitudes (
SSA) survey was launched by the
Scottish Centre for Social Research1 (part of the
National Centre for Social Research) in 1999,
following the advent of devolution. Based on annual rounds
of interviews with 1,600 people drawn using random
probability sampling its aims are to facilitate the study
of public opinion and inform the development of public
policy in Scotland. In this it has similar objectives to
the
British Social Attitudes (
BSA) survey, which was launched by the
National Centre for Social Research in 1983. While
BSA interviews people in Scotland, these
are usually too few in any one year to permit separate
analysis of public opinion in Scotland (see Park,
et al, 2003 for more details of the
BSA survey).
SSA is conducted annually and has a
modular structure. In any one year it will typically
contain four or five modules, each containing 40 questions.
Funding for its first two years came from the Economic and
Social Research Council while from 2001 onwards different
bodies have funded each year's individual modules. These
bodies have included the Economic and Social Research
Council, the Scottish Executive and various charitable and
grant awarding bodies such as the Nuffield and Leverhulme
Foundations.
Reporting conventions
Data analysis and presentation
Two types of analysis are presented in the report. The
tables and figures present the findings from simple
bivariate analyses between two variables. To keep the
presentation simple, for some variables (chiefly age,
education and social class) the tables only show the
results for a selection of categories. For example, the
views of 18-24 year olds and those over 65 are shown but
the intervening age groups have been omitted. Full versions
of the tables are available from the
Scottish Centre for Social Research on
request.
In many instances the decision as to what to present in
each table was taken after multivariate modelling using
logistic regression had been carried out. This kind of
modelling looks at the strength of the association between
one variable and a number of factors that might be related
to it while controlling for the association that all of the
other indicators have with the variable of interest. The
results therefore make it possible to establish the
relative strength of the patterns of association between
variables, for example whether someone's age or their
education level is most closely associated with their views
on an issue. It also makes it possible to eliminate factors
which are not significant once other variables have been
controlled for.
Appendices
Annex 1 provides the technical details of the surveys on
which the report is based and has further descriptions of
the analysis techniques used. Details of some of the
classification variables used in the analysis, such as
social class and urban/rural residence, are also included
here. Annex 2 contains the questions from the 2004 survey,
and the responses people gave, that are covered within this
report. Annex 3 presents the results of the multivariate
analyses included in the report.
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