Experimental Designs in the Study of Offender Decision Making

Abstract

Research on offender decision making has utilized experimental designs and has often coupled these strong designs with the use of hypothetical vignettes that describe specific offending circumstances for the would-be offender to consider. In some cases, these studies have experimentally manipulated situational elements of the imagined setting. In others, researchers have experimentally manipulated the context in which the participants make the decision. Other researchers have utilized randomized designs with behavioral analogues within the research setting. This research has found that various situational and individual-level factors influence the content and process of offender decision making in important ways. Future research should further explore how offenders form risk perceptions and how these influences may interact with one another, and it should continue to refine these methods to more closely approximate real-world settings.

The Virtual Reality Scenario Method: Moving from Imagination to Immersion in Criminal Decision-making Research

“…they are limited in their ability to capture the more visceral and emotional aspects involved in real-world offending, which commonly occurs during "hot" and altered states of mind (Exum and Bouffard 2010:581). Secondly, a 10-to 15-line narrative may not reflect the complex reality of real-life situations and realistically incorporate important nuances of social experience (e.g., Bouffard and Niebuhr 2017;Christian, Edwards, and Bradley 2010;Ditto et al 2006;Parkinson and Manstead 1993). Finally, the scenario method relies on the ability of people to imagine themselves in a hypothetical situation and is not sensitive to individual differences in this ability (Collett and Childs 2011;Van Gelder, Martin, et al 2017).…”

Analytic Criminology: Mechanisms and Methods in the Explanation of Crime and its Causes

“…Ideally, the empirical study of such a person-environment interaction is based on situational data about the behavioral outcomes of particular person-place convergences, i.e., data that spatiotemporally link the person, the setting, and the action. In principle, such data can be obtained in various ways, including laboratory and field experiments (Farrington et al 2020), retrospective reporting in surveys (Wikström et al 2012), experimental scenario methods (Bouffard & Niebuhr 2017, Exum & Bouffard 2010, and analysis of process-generated data such as video footage from public surveillance cameras (Ejbye-Ernst et al 2020).…”

“…Hence, we advocate a theory-guided focus on person-environment interactions at the research design stage rather than checking only for treatment effect heterogeneity after (quasi)experimental work has been conducted. Finally, hypothetical scenarios have become a major method to test hypotheses about the interplay of personal and setting characteristics (Bouffard & Niebuhr 2017, Exum & Bouffard 2010, Nagin & Paternoster 1993, Wikström et al 2012. Compared to lab experiments, scenarios allow the representation of any kind of crime, but they do not capture actual behavior.…”