NCJ Number
118397
Journal
Canadian Journal of Criminology Volume: 31 Issue: 2 Dated: (April 1989) Pages: 155-167
Date Published
1989
Length
13 pages
Annotation
Sixteen items from a measure of attitudes toward convicts and ex-convicts were translated into English.
Abstract
The English-language form was administered to two groups: 569 cadets and 309 civilian students at an Ontario university. The French-language form was administered to 154 francophone cadets at the military college and a sample of 765 francophone students attending various institutions in the province of Quebec. A principal components factor analysis was performed on each of the four datasets. Two factors emerged. Item loadings showed a remarkable consistency across samples with the same items having their highest loading on the same factor in each of the samples. The first factor related to the respondent's willingness to interact with and trust ex-convicts. The second factor related to how convicts should be treated by society. Analyses treating the two sets of items as separate sub-scales showed that they possessed reasonably high reliability and related differentially to other variables. These results are interpreted as demonstrating the equivalence of the English and French language forms of the measure and as evidence that, in both anglophone and francophone segments of the Canadian population, a similar factor structure underlies attitudes toward members of the criminal subculture. (Author abstract)