RT Article
T1 A measure of skewness in offense distributions
JF Journal of quantitative criminology
VO 4
IS 3
SP 259
OP 274
A1 Fox, James Alan 1951-
A1 Tracy, Paul E.
A2 Tracy, Paul E.
LA English
YR 1988
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1764277317
AB It has become a criminological fact of life that a small group of offenders is responsible for a far greater share of offending than its size would suggest. For example, it is well known that in the 1945 Philadelphia birth cohort, 6% of the cohort members committed 52% of the offenses. We argue, however, that the conventional percentaging approach to measuring skewness in offense distributions is inadequate. We propose and apply an alternative approach to measuring offense skewness which utilizes the offense distribution to its fullest and can easily and meaningfully be used for comparisons across or within study populations.
K1 skewness
K1 Criminal Careers
K1 Chronic Offenders
K1 alpha
DO 10.1007/BF01072453