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Purpose. The main aim of the study was to examine the relationship between motivation for offending and personality.
Method. A specially constructed Offending Motivation Questionnaire (OMQ) was developed along the lines of Farrington's (1986, 1993) theoretical framework. The OMQ, the Mak Self-Reported Delinquency Scale, the Gudjonsson Compliance Scale (GCS), the Gough Socialisation Scale, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and the Gudjonsson Blame Attribution Inventory (BAI-R) were administered to two groups of students: college students and university students.
Results. Factor analysis of the OMQ revealed four motivational factors for offending (Compliance, Provocation, Financial, Excitement) and one further factor associated with the failure to appreciate the consequences of the criminal act. As predicted, the GCS correlated significantly with a compliance motive (i.e. being coerced, manipulated, or tricked into crime by a peer, or eagerness to please a peer), whereas the remaining four factors were associated with a low score on the Gough Socialisation Scale. External and Mental Element attributions were mainly found to be associated with provocation and consequences factors.
Conclusions. The findings support the view that there is a relationship between the motivation for offending, failure to appreciate the consequences of one's actions and personality. Further research should focus on studying this relationship among criminal populations.
Various theories have been put forward to explain criminal behaviour (e.g. Blackburn, 1993; Eysenck & Gudjonsson, 1989; Farrington, 1986, 2002). Blackburn (1993) argues that theories of criminal behaviour differ in terms of whether they focus on crime, as an aggregate of criminal activities, crime as a specific act or event or criminality as a disposition or proneness to engage in criminal activity. This paper is mainly concerned with specific criminal acts and the motivational and situational factors surrounding those acts. However, the study presented in this article also addresses dispositional aspects to criminality in terms of personality variables. The main hypotheses being tested are that there are individual differences in terms of the motivation that lie behind offending and these are related to personality variables. For example, we would expect differences in the personality of those who offend for financial gains and those who commit crime because they are pressured to do so by their peers or want to please their peers.
Farrington (1986) views delinquency as the end product...