Talk by Prof. Dr. Amy Nivette
Change in legal attitudes during adolescence and into young adulthood
May 5, 2025, 14:30 h
Andreasstrasse 15, 8050 Zurich, AND 3.46 (3rd floor)
What drives changes in attitudes towards police and the law? How stable are these attitudes over time? Legal socialization research has shown that legal attitudes develop early through interactions with (informal and formal) authorities and moral developmental processes. However, this research also suggests that legal attitudes are relatively stable over time. This brings up an important question regarding measuring change over time: when can we observe and explain meaningful change in legal attitudes? In more ‘traditional’ longitudinal research, change is explained as a function of unit-changes in other self-reported attitudes and predictors occurring at the same or previous time point. Time between measurements can be 2, 5 or more years, and effects are typically small. What can these small, incremental changes over time actually tell us about legal socialization or other developmental processes? How then can we identify meaningful changes and effects over time? This paper will first review existing longitudinal research on legal attitudes to try to identify how (un)stable these attitudes are during adolescence and young adulthood, particularly at different timeframes. Second, using data from ZPROSO, I will assess and compare changes in legal attitudes (legal cynicism and police legitimacy) in several ways that can disentangle the variability and stability of attitudes over time, including for example latent growth models, continuous time and hidden Markov models. The goal of this paper is to critically consider how we measure stability and change in developmental research, and to reflect on what kinds of claims we are making (and what claims can we make) when we analyse change over time.