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ABSTRACT
In this study, a questionnaire was administered to 142 students at two high schools (72 boys and 70 girls) and 112 students at a state college (36 men and 76 women) to determine whether they favored the death penalty for certain criminal acts. A questionnaire was also administered to assess extraversion and neuroticism. The findings indicated that high school students rated more criminal acts as meriting the death penalty than did college students. Gender and personality were not found to be associated with attitudes toward the death penalty.
Lester (1987) gave a list of twenty criminal acts to college students and police officers and found that the police officers checked an average of 10.7 acts as meriting the death penalty while the college students checked 8.6. The present study was designed in part to explore how adolescents responded to this questionnaire as compared to college students.
In other research on attitudes toward the death penalty, Starr (1983) reported that women were less in favor of capital punishment than were men, while McKelvie (1983) reported that extraversion scores were positively associated...