NCJ Number
115267
Date Published
1978
Length
126 pages
Annotation
The survey plan reported here is designed to examine juvenile case classification and dispositional decisionmaking in highly divergent environments in an effort to identify hypotheses that promise theoretical and practical leads to future study.
Abstract
The survey plan is part of a larger study of the current state of knowledge about how and why juvenile justice system professionals choose to classify individual juveniles as abused/victimized, neglected/dependent, incorrigible/in need of supervision, or delinquent/youthful offender. Since the literature review revealed no empirical studies dealing directly with juvenile classification, the survey intends to discover promising direction for future policy research on determinants of juvenile case classification. The survey has three parts intended to describe juvenile case classification and related case specific decisionmaking across all components of the justice system. The information solicited through the questionnaire focuses on the decisionmaker, the justice system environment, and specific information used by decisionmakers in classifying juvenile cases. This report explains the analysis plan for each of the three data types, survey administration (respondent selection, forms distribution and retrieval, and on-site data control), and site selection. Survey results will be added to this report after the survey and analysis have been completed. Appended survey forms, instructions, and selected methodological considerations.