Beyond the Vignette: Mapping Offender Decision-Making

• In Event: Decision-Making, Quasi-Rational Choice, and Behavioral Economics

Abstract

Vignettes and scenarios have been used prominently by decision-making researchers toward elucidating a respondent or offender’s willingness to engage in a set behavior. This method comes with many limitations and is often cumbersome to decipher what components of a scenario or prompt are causing the given responses. We have developed an alternative web-based platform for capturing offender decision-making directly through a layered decision tree for a burglary scenario. This approach allows us to capture the decisions made by the respondent through the scenario, the time spent with each component of the decision tree, and a final willingness to offend measure. Preliminary results with both college and offender samples are presented along with the interface design for the web-based platform.

Authors

• Theodore Wilson, University of Maryland

• James Jessup, University of Maryland

• Raymond Paternoster, University of Maryland