Police Perceptions of Maori - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

This would have provided data comparable with other jurisdictions. On the other
hand, these scales provide an indirect rather than a direct measure of racism, they are
not a direct measure of anti-Maori attitudes, and the approach could be considered
devious or deceptive.
A second option was to use a semantic differential scale which involves asking
respondents to rate various groups on personality characteristics such as warm/cold,
good/bad or strong/weak. The advantage of this is that it is a standard strategy for
measuring racial prejudice. However, the strategy is again indirect (and therefore
potentially seen as devious) and has the disadvantage that it asks respondents to
reproduce stereotypes about Maori which may not necessarily have a strong
relationship with their behaviour. Similar problems arise with adjective checklists such
as those used by Dance (1987). Although Dance did elicit some differences in the
most common descriptions of Maori compared to Pakeha, it was difficult to interpret
what the consequences of these would be for behaviour.
Consideration was also given to using standard vignettes about Maori, Pakeha and
Asian offenders with a counterbalanced experimental design presenting each vignette
randomly matched with different racial groups to each officer (as in Dance, 1987).
This technique would allow comparison with Dance's results and has the advantage of
providing a realistic simulation of situations that occur for police but Dance did not
find significant differences using this strategy. Furthermore, it is relatively time
consuming and does not allow a score to be calculated for each officer which would
enable comparisons to be made between officers of different ranks and experience.
After pre-testing some of the above options and further discussion with the clients of
the research, it was finally decided not to use any of the above techniques. Instead, a
number of items were devised which explored current Maori political aspirations and
police officers were asked to respond to these on a five point scale of
agreement/disagreement. In addition, in line with a 'Modern Racism Scale' developed
in the United States (McConahay, 1986), a number of items were developed which
stated common negative views about Maori issues and respondents were asked about
their agreement/disagreement with these.
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