criminal justice research methods

the things we know from direct experience (touching a stove)

things we consider real because we have been told they are real; and everyone agrees (sun sets in the West)

where knowledge is produced based on experience or observation

science of knowing

science of finding out

“things that everyone knows”

trusting the judgment of someone with special expertise

Prevents innovation or questioning of status quo; may simply be inaccurate

comparing program goals to results

prospective – anticipate future consequences of alternative actions

Offenses that are wrong by their very nature.
Violation of a public attitude
Murder, theft, robbery, etc.

Offenses prohibited by law but not wrong in themselves.
Victimless crimes (drug use, gambling, prostitution)
Regulatory infractions

logic and observation

Theory
Data collection
Data analysis

systematic explanation for the observed facts and laws that relate to a particular aspect of life

a specified expectation and empirical reality

to find patterns of regularity in social life

characteristics that describe some object/person

logical groupings

an attribute on one variable is expected to cause, predispose, or encourage an attribute on another variable

“cause”, “influencer”

“effect”, “depends”

a full and detailed understanding of a single case or situation

are partial explanations that explain a class of situations or events rather than a single one.

moves from the specific to the general
From a set of observations to the discovery of a pattern among them
Grounded theory

moves from the general to the specific
From a logically or theoretically-expected pattern to observations that test the presence of the pattern

bridges idiographic and nomothetic approaches to explanation by seeking to understand how casual mechanisms operate in specific contexts

Observing a single point in time (cross-section); simple and least costly way to conduct research
We cannot see social processes or changes; have to worry if we picked a bad point in time to capture
Typically descriptive or exploratory in nature

Trend – those that study changes within some general population over time (UCR)
Cohort – examine more specific populations as they change over time (Wolfgang study)
Panel – similar to trend or cohort, but the same set of people is interviewed on two or more occasions (NCVS) (panel attrition)

Asks people to recall their past for the purpose of approximating observations over time
People have faulty memories; people lie
Analysis of past records also suffer from problems – records may be unavailable, incomplete, or inaccurate
Prospective research – longitudinal study that follows subjects forward in time (Widom – child abuse/drug use)

Cross-sectional study = snapshot – an image at one point in time
Trend study = slide show – a series of snapshots in sequence over time, allows us to tell how some indicator varies over time
Panel study = motion picture – gives information about individual observations over time

In real data (not fixed-length randomly generated), the number one appears as the leading digit roughly 30% of the time
The probability of each successive digit is logarithmically lessened from that which precedes it

The common sense answer: 182.5
However, we reach a 97% probability with only 50, 99% with 57
This is because every person drew from the pool has a relative decaying probability of uniqueness
If you’re the gambling type, you exceed 50% with only 23!

mental image we have about something

words, phrases, or symbols in language that are used to represent these mental images in communication
e.g., gender, punishment, chivalry, delinquency, poverty, intelligence, racism, sexism, assault, deviance, income

The mental process of making concepts more precise to specify what we mean
Results in a set of indicators and dimensions of what we have in mind
Indicates a presence or absence of the concept we are studying
Violent crime = offender uses force (or threatens to use force) against a victim

specifiable aspect of a concept

you should be able to classify every observation in terms of one of the attributes composing the variable

you must be able to classify every observation in terms of one and only one attribute

offer names or labels for characteristics (race, gender, state of residence)

attributes can be logically rank-ordered (education, opinions, occupational status

meaningful distance between attributes (temperature, IQ)

has a true zero point (age, # of priors, sentence length, income)

Whether a particular measurement technique, repeatedly applied to the same object, would yield the same result each time

The extent to which an empirical measure adequately reflects the meaning of the concept under consideration

History – external events may occur during the course of the experiment
Maturation – people constantly are growing
Testing – the process of testing and retesting
Instrumentation – Changes in the measurement process
Statistical regression – Extreme scores regress to the mean
Selection bias – the way in which subjects are chosen
Experimental mortality – subjects may drop out prior to completion of experiment
Ambiguous Casual Time Order – the dependent variable actually caused the change in the stimulus