Offense Narrative Roles of Turkish Offenders

• Author: Emek Yuce Zeyrek-Rios,David V. Canter,Donna Youngs
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X211010285
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X211010285

International Journal of

Offender Therapy and

Comparative Criminology

2022, Vol. 66(12) 1237 –1262

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0306624X211010285

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Article

Offense Narrative Roles of

Turkish Offenders

Emek Yuce Zeyrek-Rios1,

David V. Canter2, and Donna Youngs3

Abstract

The study of offense narratives emphasizes the agency of the offender which brings

psychology closer to law. As an effort to create a standardized and quantitative

method to evaluate offender narratives, Youngs and Canter developed the Narrative

Roles Questionnaire (NRQ) based on the content analyses of the crime narratives

of offenders in UK prisons. The current study aims to investigate the applicability of

offense narrative roles framework among Turkish offenders. The application of the

offense narrative roles model to a non-Western country is the first step toward the

acceptance of criminal narrative theory as a universal explanation of criminal behavior.

A translation of the NRQ was administered to 468 Turkish male inmates who have

committed a wide range of offenses from fraud to murder. The results of an MDS

analysis yielded four roles, namely Professional, Revenger, Hero, and Victim, echoing

the original formulation proposed by Youngs and Canter. The reliability coefficients

of scales derived for these roles were all at desired levels. The results support the

applicability of the NRQ framework in a non-English context.

Keywords

Narrative Roles Questionnaire, Turkish offenders, narrative theory, offense roles,

offense narrative roles model

Narrative Theory

People make sense of the world by developing a personal narrative. Both expected and

unexpected changes in circumstances affect the flow of that story line, shape the

1Mardin Artuklu University, Turkey

2University of Liverpool, UK

3Kingston University, London, UK

Corresponding Author:

Emek Yuce Zeyrek-Rios, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Letters, Mardin Artuklu University,

Edebiyat Fakultesi, Artuklu Yerleşkesi, Diyarbakır Yolu, Mardin 47200, Turkey.

Email: eyz200@nyu.edu

1010285IJOXXX10.1177/0306624X211010285International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative CriminologyZeyrek-Rios et al.

research-article2021

1238 International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 66(12)

narratives, and have great impact on the characters, identities, and roles that are

assigned to selves and others (McAdams, 1988). One of the most significant research-

ers in narrative theory, McAdams (2008), defines narrative identity as “individual’s

internalized, evolving, and integrative story” which starts to develop during adoles-

cence and early adulthood and continues to evolve throughout the life span (p. 242).

The focus of the life stories, the characters, and the imago(es) which “is an idealized

personification of the self that functions as a protagonist in the narrative,” change

throughout life as the demands of each age span change (McAdams, 2001, p. 206).

Narrative Theory in Criminology

The narrative approach is also increasingly contributing to the understanding of crimi-

nality. The narrative has been conceptualized mainly in three ways by criminologists

and each conceptualization has been adopted by researchers with different approaches.

As Presser (2010) argues, criminologists, due to their positivist tendencies, mostly take

the narrative “either as a record or as interpretation” (p. 434). The first way of approach-

ing narratives is to treat them as a record of experience. This raises questions about the

authenticity of offender narratives. One of the reasons why the authenticity of offender

narratives is found questionable, which in turn has prevented criminologists from

acknowledging narratives as a means to explain criminal behavior, stems from the

notion that offenders are inclined to distort reality to manipulate others (Presser, 2009).

The second way of approaching narratives, especially by ethnographers of crime, and

criminologists with a feminist or other critical approaches, is viewing narratives as

interpretations (Presser, 2009, 2010). The subjectivity of the accounts is not considered

problematic if the aim is to uncover the “individual versions of actual circumstances”

(Presser, 2009, p. 183). Lastly, only a few of those in the field adopt an approach view-

ing the narrative as “a shaper of experience” (Presser, 2010, p. 435). Presser builds a

case for “a narrative criminology that situates stories as antecedents to crime” (Presser,

2009, p. 178). Maruna and Copes (2005), by focusing on the role of narratives on the

future actions of offenders, explain the underlying mechanisms of desistance from or

persistence with crime through neutralizations embedded within personal narratives.

Maruna (2001) suggests that involvement in future criminal behavior depends on

the connotations of the incident in the offender’s mind. In a similar fashion, Ward et al.

(2007) propose that by therapeutic interventions a positive change in the offender’s

narrative will act as a preventive factor against recidivism. The main proposal is that

reconstruction of the interpretation of a past offending behavior can shape future

actions. In the current paper, narratives are identified as subject to reconstruction and

change in the face of life events. Thus, the offense narrative roles framework supports

the theories proposed by Maruna (2001) and Ward et al. (2007) as ways of understand-

ing, predicting, and preventing recidivism. The narrative roles model used here is dif-

ferentiated from desistance theories in terms of its contribution to the understanding of

the initiation of the criminal action.

The criminal narrative roles framework provides a rich understanding of the inter-

nal processes that take place during an offense in contrast to approaches that explain