"Beyond official statistics collected by the FBI in the UCR and victimization surveys, there are many self-report surveys that attempt to gather information from the offenders’ perspective. Self-report surveys provide information about criminal incidents from the offenders’ perspective and are able to capture information about crimes that do not come to the attention of the police, that victims are not willing to report, as well as public order and other offenses that may not have a clearly identifiable victim. Self-report surveys were developed beginning in the 1940s and 1950s out of concern among criminologists that official statistics were reflecting a distorted picture of crime. Self-report measures have developed substantially over the past 50 years and are now considered a fundamental reliable and valid method of scientifically measuring criminality and the bedrock of etiological studies (Thornberry & Krohn, 2000). Self-report surveys provide information about criminal events that is not translated into legalistic definitions and the victim perspective and are one of the few means through which information about offender motivation can be obtained. Information about offender motivation generally comes from two sources: self-report of involvement in crime or inferences made by researchers from behavioral evidence. Obtaining accurate data on offender motivation is problematic because it involves either trusting the offenders’ account or making inferences from behaviors."