Peculiarities Of The Apprehension Of Economic Offences By Learners

Connectivity of learners’ apprehension of economic offences and their attitude towards offending behaviour.

The development of a social group of modern learners is described as a cybersocialization (Nesmeyanova, 2017; Pleshakov, 2010) and characterized by an intensive usage of digital technologies and uncontrolled aggressive and illegitimate Internet content consumption. This fact causes risks of a possible deformation of motivating human needs and moral values. One of the ways to overcome such deformations is to form legal consciousness. Under the conditions of juridical literacy increase in population as a general tendency, modern Russian learners get involved in the process of education (Kubyshko, 2017). By the end of schooling, the basics of juridical literacy should be formed (Federal State Educational Standards of secondary (complete) and general education) (Federal State Educational Standard for Secondary General Education…, 2012). The basic laws and regulations of the Russian Federation and International laws ratified in Russia are studied by students in terms of such disciplines as Social studies, National history, World history, Economics and Economic geography. In some educational institutions of secondary (complete) education, there is a discipline of Jurisprudence science. During the lesson of the abovementioned disciplines learners become familiar with such notions as “crime”, “offensive behavior” and “offence”. They come to know the content and examples of the notions. The purpose of the study is the formation of apprehension about such manifestations of human behavior and negative attitude towards them as the term “apprehension” comprehends the subject’s stance towards the knowledge he or she receives (Lectersky, 2010). Along with this, the research on the efficiency of juridical study by learners has not been held, and it remains an actual challenge. Our research is mostly about Moscow senior learners’ apprehension of such economic offences as “blackmail”, “bribery”, “profiteering”, “abusive exercise of power”, “negligence”, “stealage”, “nepotism”, “corruption”, etc. Crimes and offending behavior are chosen purposely. It is important to study learners’ apprehension about economic offences at the stage of their studentship when learners are not drawn into criminal corruptive relations, hence, it is easier to explain and vividly demonstrate all the negative consequences of participation in it.

Subjects.

The sample consisted of 103 respondents (46 boys and 57 girls). All of them were students of three schools in Moscow aged 15 to 18 years old.

Methods

Diagnostic methods: 1) the “Open Questions” technique - diagnostics of the level of development of learners’ views on economic offences; 2) the modified technique for diagnosing the level of development of logical operations on the basis of legal concepts on economic offences (ibid.); 3) the case-method is to diagnose the level of development of the ability to recognize the situations of corruption interaction (Pogozhina, Pshenichnyuk, 2014; Pshenichnyuk, 2015, 2016).

Statistical data processing of the experimental data was carried out using statistical software package SPSS 22.0 and included descriptive statistics, statistical hypothesis testing, correlation analysis for connected samples (Spearman (ρ), Sign test, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test) and procedures of content analysis.

Procedure

The subjects under test performed diagnostic tasks for nearly 1 hour 30 minutes. All the diagnostic material was presented at the same time. The obtained data (results) underwent the procedures of statistical analysis and content analysis.

Results of the diagnosis of the level of development of the learners’ ideas about economic violations (on the example of the concept of "corruption").

In accordance with the wording of the concept of "corruption" in the law of the Russian Federation (Federal Law of the Russian Federation of December 25, 2008 N 273-FZ "On Counteracting Corruption", 2008), among the survey respondents it is determined in full ≈50% of all the respondents. We have analyzed the learners’ answers to the tasks of the "Open questions" methodology using content analysis tools. The word indicators that the respondents use to define the concept of "corruption" and give the examples of the situations of corruption interaction are singled out: illegal, benefit and bribery. The number of references in the protocols of the respondents' responses to word-markers is presented in Table 01 .

As it can be seen in Table 01 , the learners suggest that a crime of corruption is an illegal act that entails obtaining benefits, usually by giving/receiving bribes. This indicates that the learners have a correct idea of corruption-related crimes. However, their ideas remain incomplete and unilateral and do not contain any knowledge about other forms of corruption interaction, such as "nepotism", "illegal enrichment", "abuse of power", etc.

Results of the diagnosis of the level of development of the logical operation under the concept of a material on justice submissions of economic violations.

The results of the diagnosis of the level of development of the logical operation of bringing the notion of economic offences to the concept of material on the material have shown at what level the respondents have the ability to compare, analyze and classify the legal concepts of "blackmail", "fraud", "nepotism", "corruption", "illegal enrichment "," embezzlement "," rollback "," bribery "," favouritism "," lobbyist ". Most successfully the respondents cope with the tasks determining the content of the concepts of "blackmail" and "nepotism", as well as with the classification of the concepts "corruption", "nepotism", "rollback" and "bribery". About 60% of the respondents successfully coped with these tasks.

The greatest difficulty is caused by the tasks aimed at defining the concepts of "fraud", "illegal enrichment", "favouritism" and "lobbyist". Only 40% of the respondents could successfully cope with these tasks. The verbal results are presented in Table. 02 .

The results indicate that more than half of the respondents have a full understanding of the content of the economic crime concepts under study, and also have logical analysis, comparison and classification operations. From our point of view this knowledge is a basis for the formation of learners’ ideas about the regulatory justice submissions for such crimes and negative attitude to such manifestations of behavior.

Results of diagnosing the level of development of the ability to recognize situations of economic violations (on the basis of potentially corrupt situations).

The results of the diagnosis of the ability to recognize (Galperin, 2017) unlawful situations have shown that the most successful learners have learned such concepts of economic violations as "bribe" and "negligence". The least successful is the majority of respondents who recognize the situation of extortion of money.

About 30% of learners gave reasons for their answers, which were analyzed using the content analysis method. We identified 4 words-identifiers for characterizing crimes of an economic nature. These words are catch, blackmail, illegal, abnormal. How often they were used by the respondents is reflected in Table. 03 .

The data obtained indicate that we can draw such conclusions: learners use the basic words when characterizing unlawful actions. These words: "benefit" and "illegal." Therefore, we say that learners are associated with crimes by obtaining some benefit through a way that is contrary to the law. This means that such crimes learners are called deviating from the generally accepted norms of behaviour, namely they consider them forms of deviant behaviour. From our point of view, this conclusion has a positive connotation. testifies to the negative attitude of schoolchildren towards illegal behaviour.

Studying the relationship between the level of development in learners’ perceptions of economic violations and the ability to recognize unlawful situations.

Table 04 presents the results of statistical analysis of the relationship between the level of development of the learners’ perceptions of economic violations and the ability to recognize unlawful situations.

Significant correlations (ρ≤0,01) between the level of development of knowledge about economic crime among the schoolchildren (by the example of corruption) are obtained. These are the isolation of the characteristics of the concept, reduction of the examples of illegal behaviour and level of development of the ability to recognize situations of unlawful interaction. As a result of processing, we have obtained significant correlation (ρ≤0,05) between the level of development of logical operations of the knowledge about economic crime and the level of development of the ability to recognize situations of unlawful interaction (by the example of corruption). We believe that this shows that the basis for the formation of negative attitudes (rejection) of criminal behaviour among the schoolchildren is the knowledge about economic violations, their types, the ability to recognize them by the schoolchildren.