Delinquency and attitude to authority: a comment on Reicher and Emler.
In their study of self-reported delinquency, Reicher & Emler (1985) use an ad hoc scale to measure attitudes to authority rather than one of the well-validated scales already in the literature. The items they finally used were almost all anti-authority--thus rendering their results susceptible of an explanation in terms of acquiescent response bias. It is shown that such an explanation would indeed provide a powerful account of what they found. Their work is therefore of uncertain meaning.
D001290:Attitude; D001318:Authoritarianism; D006801:Humans; D007604:Juvenile Delinquency / Q000523:psychology*; D012107:Research Design / Q000592:standards*