Trajtenberg Nicolás, Ezquerra Pablo, Williams Matthew
Department of Criminology, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.
Psychiatr Psychol Law. 2024 Apr 7;32(2):213-239. doi: 10.1080/13218719.2023.2296476. eCollection 2025.
Criminologists have developed different measures of public attitudes toward punishment. However, most of the research focuses on the explanation of punitive attitudes with scarce evaluation of the structure of the concept. The goal of this article is to conduct a sounder assessment of the measurement properties of punitive attitudes using exploratory and confirmatory analysis including bifactor analysis in a representative sample of 895 individuals. Results suggest that although confirmatory factor analysis shows that punitive attitudes are multidimensional, bifactor analysis provides support for a more unidimensional characterisation of the scale. Results suggest that conclusions regarding the dimensionality of punitive attitudes should be tempered by the type of analysis that is conducted. We finish discussing the implications for future research.
犯罪学家已经开发出不同的衡量公众对惩罚态度的方法。然而，大多数研究都集中在对惩罚性态度的解释上，而对该概念的结构评估较少。本文的目的是在一个由895人组成的代表性样本中，使用探索性和验证性分析（包括双因素分析），对惩罚性态度的测量属性进行更合理的评估。结果表明，虽然验证性因素分析表明惩罚性态度是多维度的，但双因素分析为该量表更单维的特征提供了支持。结果表明，关于惩罚性态度维度的结论应根据所进行的分析类型来加以调整。我们最后讨论了对未来研究的启示。
