Legal socialisation and questionnaire development on policing for primary school-aged children in London, UK

• In Event: Advances in quantitative methods 4

Abstract

Fielding surveys to primary school-aged children (6–10-year-olds) regarding their attitudes towards police has multiple challenges. The questions must be easy to read and comprehend while maintaining the children's attention for the survey duration. The questionnaire also needs to consider how primary school children think about authority relations, in other words, their stage of legal socialisation. Finally, due to the location of the study (London, UK), it also needs to be sensitive to cultural differences and linguistic challenges (i.e., English is not the main language spoken at home for many children).

In preparation for the ‘Awareness Academy’ randomised controlled trial (an ongoing test of classroom-based intervention carried out by the police), our team designed and tested a questionnaire for primary school children. In this presentation, we will demonstrate how visual elicitation – appropriately used – can assist in capturing the attention of younger age groups. We will discuss how focus group-led cognitive interviews can be used to gauge children's understanding of and engagement with various questions and how these can be used as effective tools for questionnaire development. We will also outline online probing as a necessary method to assess whether the survey works in different modes of delivery (i.e., computers and tablets).

Our results indicate that younger children (6–8-year-olds) mainly engage with authority figures via their emotions, such as safety, happiness, or security but tend to allude to more complex constructs. Conversely, older children (8-10-year-olds) have a better understanding of certain aspects of fairness (distributive and procedural), trust, and effectiveness but struggled with the concept of legitimacy. We will finish our presentation by drawing conclusions regarding the generalisability of our results and to what extent the same or similar questions could be used internationally.

Authors

• Amal Ali, London School of Economics

• Krisztián Pósch, University College London

• Jasmine Oware, London School of Economics