Document Type
Poster Presentation
Start Date
20-4-2017 10:00 AM
End Date
20-4-2017 11:00 AM
Keywords
Crime, Addiction, Scale
Biography
I was born in Springfield Ohio to my parents Jason and Sherry Everidge. My parents were both ministers and we moved from church to church living in Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Iowa, and now West Virginia. I joined the Army National Guard when I turned 17, to both serve my country and pay for my way through college. I am finishing my bachelors in psychology and plan to pursue my doctoral degree in clinical psychology.
Major
Psychology
Advisor for this project
Dr. Marc Lindberg
Abstract
Although it has been theorized that high levels of criminality can be understood as involving the seeking of excitement, and feelings of power, there are currently no scales or empirical approaches that have been offered to measure this. The crime addiction scale will measure an addictive crime hypothesis which suggests that the positive stimulation that derives from committing crime may lead to an addiction of criminality. The scale will question the criminals on how much power they felt, how much they felt they would gain, how exciting it was, and how much fun did they believe they would have. There have been two studies completed in regards to the crime addiction scale. Males from a maximum security prison (N=206), and women from a women’s maximum security prison (N=293) were tested using the new scale proposed by Linderg (2015). The scale was found to have good coefficient alphas α=.91 for the males and .91 for the females. It was found that the crime addiction scale worked well with the ACE, ACIQ, and Peer Crime scales in order to predict the amount of crimes committed. The tests were all statistically significant in both male and female inmates which allows us to conclude that the crime addiction scale has the potential to test for the addictive properties of crime.
Crime Addiction Scale
Although it has been theorized that high levels of criminality can be understood as involving the seeking of excitement, and feelings of power, there are currently no scales or empirical approaches that have been offered to measure this. The crime addiction scale will measure an addictive crime hypothesis which suggests that the positive stimulation that derives from committing crime may lead to an addiction of criminality. The scale will question the criminals on how much power they felt, how much they felt they would gain, how exciting it was, and how much fun did they believe they would have. There have been two studies completed in regards to the crime addiction scale. Males from a maximum security prison (N=206), and women from a women’s maximum security prison (N=293) were tested using the new scale proposed by Linderg (2015). The scale was found to have good coefficient alphas α=.91 for the males and .91 for the females. It was found that the crime addiction scale worked well with the ACE, ACIQ, and Peer Crime scales in order to predict the amount of crimes committed. The tests were all statistically significant in both male and female inmates which allows us to conclude that the crime addiction scale has the potential to test for the addictive properties of crime.
