Welcome to the Spring 2007 semester! JS105, Section 3 Research Methods Wednesdays 5:30 – 8:15 PM, MH 526 Instructor: Din

1. Welcome to the Spring 2007 semester! JS105, Section 3 Research Methods Wednesdays 5:30 – 8:15 PM, MH 526 Instructor: Dina Kameda www.justice-studies.com

2. Chapter 1:Crime, Criminal Justice, and Scientific Inquiry

3. Introduction: Why Study Research Methods? Criminal justice (CJ) professionals are both consumers and producers of research. • I’m going to become a CJ professional, and I’ll be working in law enforcement, or corrections, or court services! Why should I learn research methods when I won’t be doing research? • A CJ professional, as a consumer of research, needs to be able to: (1) interpret research findings; (2) discern whether those findings are valid and reliable; and (3) discern whether the findings are applicable • National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) • And then there’s....

4. Introduction: Why Study Research Methods? ELMO No, not this ELMO.... Home Detention with Electronic Monitoring (example pp. 4-5)

5. Introduction: Why Study Research Methods? (continued) Home Detention w/Electronic Monitoring: Preliminary Report

6. Introduction: Why Study Research Methods? (continued) Home Detention w/Electronic Monitoring: Additional Information

7. What is this Book About? • Textbook:Research Methods for Criminal Justice and Criminology • Focus: How we know what we know • Two Realities: • Experiential reality – The things we know from direct experience • Agreement reality – The things we consider real because we’ve been told they’re real, and everyone else seems to agree they are real • Difference between the two realities in law enforcement • Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment • The Role of Science • An approach to both types of realities • Epistemology and methdology

8. Personal Human Inquiry • We make predictions about future circumstances based on present circumstances • The effects are more likely to occur when the causes are present, than when they are not • We often make predictions without understanding why they occur (simple observation and remembering patterns) • Scientific approach: (1) Understand why things are related to each other, leads to better predictions; (2) This understanding involves personal inquiry, direct experience, and agreement reality (2nd hand knowledge) • Tradition • Authority

9. Errors in Personal Human Inquiry There are (5) main errors in personal human inquiry: • Inaccurate Observation • Overgeneralization • Selective Observation • Illogical Reasoning • Ideology and Politics

10. The Foundations of Social Science • Theory, not philosophy or belief • What is and why? • Can be used to assess what ought to be, but only with agreement • Regularities • Patterns of regularity (norms and rules) • Other regularities • Is it worth studying? • What about exceptions? • Exceptions do not invalidate regularities • Patterns of regularity are probabilistic • Aggregates, not individuals • Patterns of regularity reflect aggregates • Social science theory focuses on aggregate behavior

11. The Foundations of Social Science • A variable language • We seek insights into classes or types of people • As researchers, our interest focuses on variables and aggregates • Not insensitive to individuals (case of DV) • Variables and attributes • Social scientists study variables and the attributes that compose them • Attributes: Characteristics or qualities that describe some object such as a person • Variables: Logical groupings of attributes • Variables and relationships • Theories describe relationships that might logically be expected among variables • Independent (cause) and dependent (effect) variables

12. Purpose of Research We conduct criminal justice research to serve different purposes. • Exploration: • Much criminal justice research is conducted to explore a specific problem (i.e., drug use) • Exploratory studies are also appropriate when a policy change is being considered (e.g., stricter enforcement of laws, longer sentences) • Exploratory research in criminal justice can be simple or complex, using a variety of methods (e.g., simple report or a sophisticated survey) • Description: • Describe the scope of the crime problem or policy response to the problem • Concerned with counting or documenting observations (i.e., UCR)

13. Purpose of Research (continued) • Explanation: • Simply to explain things (variable relationships) • Example: A researcher has an explanatory purpose if he or she wishes to know why the number of 14-year olds involved in gangs has increased, as opposed to simply describing changes in gang membership. • Application: • Applied research stems from a need for specific facts and findings with policy implications • Two types of applied research: (1) Evaluation: Evaluate the effects of specific criminal justice programs; (2) Policy Analysis: Focuses on what if questions, tries to anticipate the future consequences of alternative actions.

14. Differing Avenues for Inquiry Three broad and interrelated distinctions underlie many of the variations of social science research: • Idiographic and Nomothetic Explanations • Two distinct forms of causal reasoning (explaining things): (1) idiographic and Nomothetic • Idio “unique, separate, peculiar, or distinct” • Nomothetic: seeks to explain a class of situations or events rather than a single one. • Inductive and Deductive Reasoning • Inductive: Moves from specific to general, from a set of particular observations to the discovery of a pattern. • Deductive: Moves from the general to the specific

15. Differing Avenues for Inquiry • Quantitative and Qualitative Data • Distinction between quantitative and qualitative data is the distinction between numerical and non-numerical data. • Most observations are qualitative • Quantification often makes our observations more explicit, makes it easier to aggregate and summarize data, and opens up the possibility of statistical analyses. • Non-numerical observations seem to convey a greater richness of meaning than do quantified data. • Quantitative measures will be more superficial than qualitative descriptions. • Both quantitative and qualitative methods are useful and legitimate.

16. Ethics and Criminal Justice Research • Ethics is especially important in studying crime and criminal justice, because our interest often focuses on human behavior that is illegal. • Foremost ethical rule: Bring no harm to research subjects. 3. Another basic rule: Participation should be voluntary

17. Main Points • Knowledge of research methods is valuable to criminal justice professionals as consumers and producers of research (1). • Much of our knowledge is based on agreement rather than direct experience (4). • Tradition and authority are important sources of knowledge (5). • Empirical research is based on experience and produces knowledge through systematic observation (6). • In day-to-day inquiry, we often make mistakes. Science offers protection against such mistakes (7).

18. Main Points (continued) • Scientists avoid: • Overgeneralization through replication (9) • Illogical reasoning by being as careful and deliberate in their thinking as in their observations (10) • The scientific study of crime guards against, but does not prevent, ideological and political beliefs from influencing research findings (11). • Social science involves three fundamental aspects: theory, data collection, and data analysis (12). • Social scientists are interested in explaining aggregates, not individuals (14).

19. Main Points (continued) • Although social scientists observe people, they are primarily interested in discovering relationships that connect variables (15). • Data may be quantitative or qualitative (17). • Theories may be inductive or deductive (18). • Two key ethical guidelines in social science research are that no harm should come to research subjects and participation in research should be voluntary (19).