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Abstract
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OBJECTIVE: The study assesses the extent to which responses to different judgment tasks align consistently to reveal underlying rank orderings of violent acts by their level of severity.
METHOD: There were 4 studies (total N = 540, adult sample). Participants were presented with a variety of tasks: ranking task: report your ranking of violent acts from least to most violent; trade-off task: report how many of less violent acts is equivalent to 1 more violent act?; compensation task: report the financial compensation needed that would exactly compensate you for being a victim of a violent act. For these tasks they were required to consider 3 violent acts (Study 1), and 8 violent acts (Studies 2, 3, and 4).
RESULTS: The similarity in the rank ordering of violent acts by severity in each study was relatively high in each study (77-92%). In Study 4 the average compensation (USD) request was for a spit ($8,929), slap ($9,876), kick ($10,499), punch ($10,354), head-butt ($19,636), threaten with a knife ($11,631), choke ($118,119), and stab ($125,596). A meta-analysis conducted across studies (2-4) also revealed that there was general agreement in the way in which violent acts were ordered by severity (p <.0005); from least to most severe: spit, slap, kick, punch, head-butt, threaten with a knife, choke, and stab.
CONCLUSION: People generally agree on their ranking of violent acts according to their severity, and from this it is possible to develop ranking systems that are sensitive to people's judgments of the level of violence of various acts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)
Language: en |