Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2022 September 6

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September 6

Social science involving juvenile data sets?

This is my first time encountering this problem, so excuse my ignorance on the subject. The US Secret Service has a pretty amazing research repository that I only just found out about (no, I wasn't looking for Warehouse 13). Their 2020 report on school shootings ("Protecting America's Schools: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Targeted School Violence") is really helpful and informative, and I wanted to cite it on Wikipedia as a source in various places. Here's the strange problem I encountered: it appears that the USSS anonymized the primary data, and I'm taking a wild stab at this, but I'm guessing they did it because the subject involves juvenile shooters? That's fine, I guess, but it makes it impossible to use it as a source for any meaningful statements. Example: the social scientists in the USSS study under discussion studied 41 school shootings. They don't name the high schools in the report, and they don't name the juveniles or other victims. In some of the sources that they use, you can see that they anonymized the name of the high school by replacing it with a placeholder. The report has a lot of fascinating conclusions. For example, it has data showing how many of the 41 shooters were influenced by neo-Nazism. However, they don't name the shooters, so I can't compare one shooting to another or make any specific claims in any of our articles. Has anyone else ever run into this problem before? Is scientific research and data supporting it not accessible to the public when it involves juveniles? Viriditas (talk) 01:41, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Here in Europe I'd be very surprised if such data were not anonymised, even if it only concerned adult shooters. It's the law. I suppose privacy is less of an issue in the US. The school and people associated with it and the family of the shooters could also be negatively affected by the publicity if such details were given, or the perpetrators could be branded and suffer more punishment after serving whatever was handed by the courts. So the data collected for science are always anonymised. In news reports on individual cases, very few names (and usually no family names) are given. No real statistics on that though, as school shootings or stabbings are very rare in Europe.

Sometimes such anonymisation is taken to the extreme: some years ago there was a scientific report on the cause of death of an anonymous 115-year-old who had donated her body to science. Of course everybody knew who that was. PiusImpavidus (talk) 07:48, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the explanation. It's amazing how my question reveals more about the systemic bias of my region that anything else. I'm almost convinced there are no real answers, only more questions. Viriditas (talk) 10:10, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Not to be overly philosophical, but that conclusion applies to a lot of research done properly. --Ouro (blah blah) 14:30, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

European laws protecting the identity of adult perps are contemptuous of the general public. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:00, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

 --Lambiam 21:19, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

They put the needs of the convict ahead of the needs of the law-abiding public. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:38, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Not so. Ultimately they put the needs of the general public uppermost. Firstly, everyone must have confidence in the justice system and confidence that if they, or someone they care about, are convicted of something, they will undergo the punishment they are sentenced to, but no more than that: this is fundamental to the concept of justice. Secondly, revealing details of a perpetrator unnecessarily increases the risk that previously law-abiding persons will seek further revenge on them over and above the sentence imposed: this allows violence and criminality to snowball, to the detriment of the public as a whole.

Of course, such policies work best in mature societies with well-established, consistent justice systems. They are harder to establish and sustain in those that are relatively "young", fragmented over differing sub-jurisdictions, subject to political influences and corruption, and serving a general public still widely amenable to lynch law. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.73.43 (talk) 22:15, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

If a convicted criminal is moving into the house next door to me, I should have the right to know about it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:44, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

In the USA, you do unless the conviction has been expunged. Europe takes privacy more seriously though, and they take the stance that people have the right to not have long ago events immediately available to the public (similar to the American philosophy on juvenile delinquency). EvergreenFir (talk) 04:39, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

You mean Europe takes the side of the convicts over the side of the public. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:59, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

If they have served their punishment, then those people have the same rights as everyone else, including a right to privacy. We stopped making people wear scarlet letters for life a long time ago. --Jayron32 14:29, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Formerly incarcerated people are "the public". EvergreenFir (talk) 15:12, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

I expect you'd want to abolish the sex offender registry, for example. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:43, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

There are plenty of (apparently) reasonable criticisms of sex offender registries, especially as they are implemented in the United States, available in the articles Sex offender registry, Sex offender registries in the United States, Effectiveness of sex offender registration policies in the United States, and Movement to reform sex offender laws in the United States. It's not prima facie an absurd position to hold. Shells-shells (talk) 07:53, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

It depends whether you consider "privacy rights" of adult perps to be more important than the safety of children and other potential new victims. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:17, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Not at all. Lifetime registration on the sex offender registry can be part of the normal legislated punishment for a crime. That is an entirely different thing than someone who commits a crime for which the punishment doesn't have a lifetime component. For example, if someone steals a car, and gets a sentence of 5 years in prison for stealing the car. If they complete their punishment, they are then entitled to the same rights and privileges including the right to privacy as any citizen. Punishment always involves revocation of rights, and the state has the power to revoke rights, whether that right is one to property (fine), freedom of movement (incarceration) or privacy (registration on a list). Just as the state can designate, as punishment, life imprisonment, it can also designate, as a punishment, lifetime loss of the right to privacy. Your initial statements, which implied that any punishment for any crime must, by necessity, be for life. That is not how this works. Certainly some crimes may be adjudged to be so severe, that the state will institute punishments that are for life. But the state also will designate lesser punishments for lesser crimes; and the completion of the terms of that punishment is sufficient. The people who have completed the punishment are due the same rights as anyone else, including privacy. --Jayron32 15:03, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Isn't this a false dichotomy? These two goals are not necessarily in conflict. The abovementioned articles seem to indicate that sex offender registration policies (as they exist in the United States) have not been conclusively shown to have any impact on the likelihood of sexual offenses or recidivism. I think it's commonly assumed that publicly accessible sex offender registries improve the safety of potential victims, but this doesn't appear to be solidly supported by the evidence. Couldn't it be that a relaxation of sex offender registration—perhaps by making the registries no longer publicly viewable and only accessible to law enforcement—would reduce recidivism by lessening social stigmatization and allowing sex offenders to be more fully rehabilitated into society, thereby reducing the danger they pose to others? Shells-shells (talk) 17:58, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

This isnt only because it involves juveniles, thought that might be part of it. The standard in social sciences is that no public data may contain identifiable information. The census's American Community Survey, for example, will aggregate data in low population areas to avoid the potential for identification through process of elimination. These datasets will only be good for aggregate statements (descriptive statistics) and hypothesis testing (inferential statistics), not case studies. EvergreenFir (talk) 17:06, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. Tangential follow-up question: could what you have written be framed as a criticism of social science methodology? How useful are aggregate statements when studying gun violence in the US, for example? Viriditas (talk) 08:20, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

There are other ways of obtaining information than through published census datasets, which do not contain data about the incidence of crime anyway.  --Lambiam 08:10, 8 September 2022 (UTC)