School and home-based responding in an online youth crime survey: A natural experiment related to school lockdown in spring 2020

ABSTRACT

Our study draws from a natural experiment created by the school lockdowns in Finland during the 2020 coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic to compare at-school and home-based responses to an online youth crime survey. Using our quasi-experimental design, we examine how at-home responses during the Covid-19 lockdown affected the sample composition and reported prevalence of offences in the nationally representative Finnish Self-Report Delinquency Study 2020 (FSRD-2020) survey (N = 5503). We compare these within-year changes in 2020 to the earlier FSRD-2016 survey (N = 5955) that did not involve a transition to at-home response. According to our analysis, the share of males decreased in remote schooling. We also detected a decrease in reported offences during lockdown (remote school response) in several types of offences, net of observed compositional changes. The findings suggest that at-school data collection helps secure more inclusive samples and encourages students to self-report their offending behaviours.

KEYWORDS:

• Method effects
• school
• lockdown
• sensitive topic surveys
• crime
• covid-19
• pandemic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the University of Helsinki Ethical Review Board in Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences (33/2019)

Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Materials and/or Code availability

All data used in Study 1 and Study 2 will be made fully available via the Finnish Social Science Data Archive in 2021–2022.

Additional information

Funding

The authors have no funding to report.