APPLIED DATA ANALYSIS IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE

1. APPLIED DATA ANALYSIS IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE CJ 525 MONMOUTH UNIVERSITY Juan P. Rodriguez

2. Course Overview - 1 • The Police Chief wants to measure citizen satisfaction with the police. • The Sheriff wants to determine the fear of crime in the community. • The Mayor wants to know if the time and money used in his crime suppression program has had any impact on the town’s crime rate • The City Manager wants you to prepare a proposal to get state or federal grant funds. CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

3. Course Overview - 2 How will you accomplish these tasks? • Through the examination of quantitative and qualitative information • Through the preparation, dissemination, and evaluation of surveys • Through the use of scientific methods designed to separate fact from fiction and truth from perception. You will accomplish these tasks with research! CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

4. Course Overview - 3 At the end of the course, you will know how to: • Design and implement scholarly research projects • Acquire and analyze data • Employ scientific principles to justify your conclusions. You will be able to provide administrators, officers, and investigators with objective information they can use to address a wide variety of law enforcement concerns. CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

5. Lecture 1 KEY CONCEPTS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH

6. Key Concepts in Social Science Research • Overview • Empiricism • Data • Developing Research Questions • Theory and Hypothesis • Relationships & causality • Association • Time order • Non Spuriousness CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

7. Empiricism • Social Scientists study: • Occurrence of conditions or behaviors – Information gathered over time is used to identify trends and predict future patterns • Extent of family poverty • Frequency of criminal behavior • Relationships – How one set of conditions or behavior affect another • Which factors predict crime? • Which factors contribute to success in attaining HS and college degrees? CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

8. Empiricism • Both types of studies require rigorous observation and analysis: empirical • A critical and systematic way of separating facts from beliefs is needed: Statistics CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

9. Key Concepts in Social Science Research • Overview • Empiricism • Data • Developing Research Questions • Theory and Hypothesis • Relationships & causality • Association • Time order • Non Spuriousness CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

10. Data • A Research Project requires the collection and organizing of Data (pieces of information) • Data for analysis are organized in Datasets, linking Cases with Variables • Cases are the individual units under study. Each case has one Datum (observation) per Variable • Variables contain information about each Case in a way that makes Cases comparable CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

11. Data CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

12. Data • The course uses 2 datasets • General Social Survey (GSS98) contains demographic information from a nationally representative sample of respondents • States Data contains information on the states and the people that live in them • These data in these sets is comparable to that used by professional social scientists and policy makers CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

13. Data • Researchers should: • Gather and construct the best quality data: It should be suited to the issue of interest (GIGO) • Use Indicators that are • Reliable (consistent) • Valid: the indicator measures what is supposed to measure CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

14. Key Concepts in Social Science Research • Overview • Empiricism • Data • Developing Research Questions • Theory and Hypothesis • Relationships & causality • Association • Time order • Non Spuriousness CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

15. Developing Research Questions Why students drop out of school? CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

16. Developing Research Questions Why students drop out of school? • Identify the Research Question • The question should drive the research • Capital punishment is beneficial to societyvs.Is capital punishment a deterrent to crime? CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

17. Developing Research Questions Is there racial discrimination in the Education System? • Broad questions may need to be parsed into manageable sub questions: • Is there an equitable representation of minority groups within the curriculum? • Is there proportionate representation of minority members in school systems? • Are there differences in graduation rates among racial groups? CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

18. Developing Research Questions • Perform a Literature review • An overview of past research on topics related to the research question • It provides the knowledge gained on a subject to date • Informs the researcher of the methods and analysis others have used to answer similar questions • Allows researchers to identify unanswered questions or untried methods CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

19. Key Concepts in Social Science Research • Overview • Empiricism • Data • Developing Research Questions • Theory and Hypothesis • Relationships & causality • Association • Time order • Non Spuriousness CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

20. Theory and Hypothesis • Finding answers to research questions involves developing theories and hypothesis • Theory: unproven explanation of facts or phenomena • Hypothesis: a falsifiable statement concerning expected relationships; they can be supported or refuted when subjected to a test. CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

21. Theory and Hypothesis Deductive Approach: Uses a theory to develop a number of hypothesis to be tested • Theory: Inequities in school funding leads minority group students to perform worse that white students CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

22. Theory and Hypothesis Deductive Approach: • Hypothesis: • States with higher proportions of African Americans and Hispanics will have lower school funding • States with higher levels of school funding will have higher graduation rates CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

23. Theory and Hypothesis Deductive Approach: • Theory: Death penalty is effective at deterring crime • Hypothesis: • States that have the death penalty will have lower murder rates • States that have the death penalty will have lower recidivism rates CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

24. Theory and Hypothesis Inductive Approach • Tentative theories are based on data and researchers continuously refine the theories to concur with analyses • At the end, the researcher understands the relationships in the data and develops a theory to explain these relationships CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

25. Key Concepts in Social Science Research • Overview • Empiricism • Data • Developing Research Questions • Theory and Hypothesis • Relationships & causality • Association • Time order • Non Spuriousness CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

26. Relationship and Causality • In causal relationships a set of conditions lead to predictable outcomes • Deterministic relationships: the conditions lead to inevitable outcomes • Most social science relationships are probabilistic: certain factors increase tendencies toward particular outcomes CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

27. Relationship and Causality • Causal relationships: independent variables are hypothesized to cause changes in dependent variables • Death penalty deters crime • School funding increases educational success CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

28. Relationship and Causality • Causality Criteria: • Association: there must be a relationship between the independent and the dependent variables • Positive: an increase in one variable corresponds with an increase in the other. People with higher degrees tend to have higher incomes • Negative: an increase in one variable corresponds with a decrease in the other. People with higher levels of education tend to be less prejudiced CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

29. Relationship and Causality • Causality Criteria: • Time order: the change in the independent variable must precede the change in the dependent variable • Making the assertion Instituting the death penalty will reduce crime requires having measurements of crime activity prior to and after the establishment of the death penalty CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

30. Relationship and Causality • Causality Criteria: • Non spuriousness: the relationship between the 2 variables is not due to a third “spurious” factor. • Ice cream consumption causes drowning deaths • Association: more people drown when more ice cream is sold • Time order: increases in ice cream sales precede increases in drowning deaths CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006

31. Relationship and Causality • The unmeasured factor is temperature • More people swim in the summer and more ice cream is consumed in the summer • Researchers need to control possible spurious factors: income and education CJ 525 - Juan P. Rodriguez - Fall 2006