Why Did You Do It? The Development of a Scale to Measure Motivations for Criminal Offending

• In Event: Antisocial Behaviour, Violence, and Offending Across the Life-Course

Abstract

Over the past four decades, there has been an ever-increasing body of research examining the relationship between early childhood risk and protective factors and the development of antisocial behavior across the lifespan. Advances have also been made in forensic and correctional psychology in the areas of structured, professional risk assessment tools, and the Risk-Need-Responsivity paradigm of correctional treatment, respectively. However, much less attention has been paid to measuring the influence of the internal, motivational state(s) of individuals as contributing, causal factors for antisocial behavior. With the exception of a handful of contributions in this area (i.e., Agnew, 1990; Farrington, 1993; Gudjonsson & Sigurdsson, 2004), criminological research has focused on proximal and distal risk factors and less on the emotional and situational factors that influence the motivation of individuals to act in antisocial ways. This paper will describe the development of a structured, self-reported questionnaire that measures offender motivations to commit crime. Quantitative survey data will be presented for a sample of approximately 100 men serving custodial sentences in Ontario, Canada. Analyses will examine whether certain motivations influence specific offence types and whether some motivations are more prevalent during earlier versus later developmental stages of criminal careers. Results will be discussed with reference to developmental life course criminology and evidence-based crime prevention.

Authors

• Christopher J. Koegl, Ontario Correctional Institute

• David P. Farrington, Cambridge University