The effect of penal legitimacy on prisoners' post-release desistance

Studies of procedural justice and legitimacy have shown that where legal actors employ formal rules in ways that are perceived to be fair and consistent by those policed, greater compliance and cooperation with the law can be achieved. A growing number of studies have assessed how legitimacy and compliance are related using general population samples, but few studies have tested these links amongst offending groups. Drawing on data from a longitudinal survey of prisoners across England and Wales, we find that prisoners who perceive their experience of prison as legitimate are more likely to believe that they will desist from crime. However, despite the existence of desistance beliefs, these do not translate into similar effects of legitimacy on proven reconviction rates a year post-release

Attitudes towards the death penalty: An assessment of individual and country-level differences

Research on public attitudes to the death penalty has been predominantly understood through single nation-states, especially within the USA. Examinations of international differences in citizens' support for the death penalty have been scarce, particularly among continents with a high volume of retentionist nations (e.g. Asia). In this paper, we draw on a dataset of 135,000 people from across 81 nations to examine differences in death penalty support. We find that residents of retentionist nations are generally more supportive of the death penalty than those from abolitionist nations. But this general difference masks important differences both within and between countries. At the country-level, residents of abolitionist nations with autocratic political systems and those with higher homicide levels were more likely to support the death penalty than residents of other abolitionist nations. At the individual level, greater support for a strong dictatorial-type leader and perceptions of political corruption are associated with increased support for the death penalty, but only in abolitionist nations. By contrast, more frequent religious worship, perceived egalitarianism in a nation, and support for the political performance of government reduced death penalty support in abolitionist nations but increased support in retentionist nations, while belief in individual responsibility and critical views towards ethnic minorities increased support for the death penalty across both abolitionist and retentionist nations

Local areas and fear of criminal victimisation : applying multilevel models to the British crime survey

Fear of crime is now a central area of criminological debate and a key element of Government crime policy. Yet despite some 40 years of sustained enquiry a number of questions around the fear of crime still remain. One such question is the impact that local neighbourhood context plays in the formation of individual fears; and how these environmental influences relate to the differences in fear that have regularly been observed between different population groups. This thesis draws together the dominant individual and ecological explanations that have been put forward to explain variations in fear of crime into an integrated multilevel framework, providing a robust empirical test of the contention that neighbourhoods matter. Finally, this thesis introduces the competing influence of interviewers to provide us with further information about the contextual influences on fear.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The crucial relationship between a society’s trust in science and vaccine confidence

Vaccine hesitancy remains a problem. Patrick Sturgis (LSE), Ian Brunton-Smith (University of Surrey) and Jonathan Jackson (LSE) find that people who live in societies where trust in science is high are more confident about vaccination

Inequalities in recovery or methodological artefact? A comparison of models across physical and mental health functioning

Considerable attention has been paid to inequalities in health. More recently, focus has also turned to inequalities in 'recovery'; with research, for example, suggesting that lower grade of employment is strongly associated with slower recovery from both poor physical and poor mental health. However, this research has tended to operationalise recovery as 'return to baseline', and we know less about patterns and predictors when recovery is situated as a 'process'. This paper seeks to address this gap. Drawing on data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we operationalise recovery as both an 'outcome' and as a 'process' and compare patterns and predictors across the two models. Our analysis demonstrates that the determinants of recovery from poor health, measured by the SF-12, are robust, regardless of whether recovery is operationalised as an outcome or as a process. For example, being employed and having a higher degree were found to increase the odds of recovery both from poor physical and mental health functioning, when recovery was operationalised as an outcome. These variables were also important in distinguishing health functioning trajectories following a poor health episode. At one and the same time, our analysis does suggest that understandings of inequalities in recovery will depend in part on how we define it. When recovery is operationalised as a simple transition from poor health state to good, it loses sight of the fact that there may be inequalities (i) within a 'poor health' state, (ii) in how individuals are able to step into the path of recovery, and (iii) in whether health states are maintained over time. We therefore need to remain alert to the additional nuance in understanding which comes from situating recovery as a process; as well as possible methodological artefacts in population research which come from how recovery is operationalised.Peer reviewe

Ethnic diversity, segregation, and the social cohesion of neighbourhoods in London

The question of whether and how ethnic diversity affects the social cohesion of communities has become an increasingly prominent and contested topic of academic and political debate. In this paper we focus on a single city: London. As possibly the most ethnically diverse conurbation on the planet, London serves as a particularly suitable test-bed for theories about the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on prosocial attitudes. We find neighbourhood ethnic diversity in London to be positively related to the perceived social cohesion of neighbourhood residents, once the level of economic deprivation is accounted for. Ethnic segregation within neighbourhoods, on the other hand, is associated with lower levels of perceived social cohesion. Both effects are strongly moderated by the age of individual residents: diversity has a positive effect on social cohesion for young people but this effect dissipates in older age groups; the reverse pattern is found for ethnic segregation

Disparities in science literacy

Much is known about how adult science literacy varies internationally and over time, and about its association with attitudes and beliefs. However, less is known about disparities in science literacy across racial and ethnic groups. This is particularly surprising in light of substantial research on racial and ethnic disparities in related areas such as educational achievement, math and reading ability, representation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) occupations, and health literacy. Given the importance of science literacy to securing and sustaining many jobs, to understanding key health concepts to enhance quality of life, and to increasing public engagement in societal decision-making, it is concerning if the distribution of science literacy is unequally stratified, particularly if this stratification reflects broader patterns of disadvantage and cultural dominance as experienced by minorities and educationally underserved populations. We describe here such disparities in science literacy in the United States and attempt to explain underlying drivers, concluding that the science literacy disadvantage among black and Hispanic adults relative to whites is only partially explained by measures of broader, foundational literacies and socioeconomic status (SES)

The interviewer contribution to variability in response times in face-to-face interview surveys

Survey researchers have consistently found that interviewers make a small but systematic contribution to variability in response times. However, we know little about what the characteristics of interviewers are that lead to this effect. In this study, we address this gap in understanding by linking item-level response times from wave 3 of the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS) to data from an independently conducted survey of interviewers. The linked data file contains over three million records and has a complex, hierarchical structure with response latencies nested within respondents and questions, which are themselves nested within interviewers and areas. We propose the use of a cross-classified mixed-effects location scale model to allow for the decomposition of the joint effects on response times of interviewers, areas, questions, and respondents. We evaluate how interviewer demographic characteristics, personality, and attitudes to surveys and to interviewing affect the length of response latencies and present a new method for producing interviewer-specific intra-class correlations of response times. Hence, the study makes both methodological and substantive contributions to the investigation of response times

Testing the cultural-invariance hypothesis: a global analysis of the relationship between scientific knowledge and attitudes to science

A substantial body of research has demonstrated that science knowledge is correlated with attitudes towards science, with most studies finding a positive relationship between the two constructs; people who are more knowledgeable about science tend to be more positive about it. However, this evidence base has been almost exclusively confined to high and middle-income democracies, with poorer and less developed nations excluded from consideration. In this study, we conduct the first global investigation of the science knowledge-attitude relationship, using the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor survey. Our results show a positive knowledge-attitude correlation in all but one of the 144 countries investigated. This robust cross-national relationship is consistent across both science literacy and self-assessed measures of science knowledge

Measuring crime in place: Distinguishing between area victimisation and area offences

Crime data is essential to the running of a safe society. But are we measuring crime in the best way? Ian Brunton-Smith, Alexandru Cernat, David Buil-Gil and Jose Pina-Sánchez explore how the current system could be improve