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Part I Preparing for Criminal Justice Research
Chapter 1 Theory, Measurement, and Research Development
Chapter 2 Criminal Justice Data Sets
Chapter 3 Using SPSS
In the opening chapters of this book, we address its two main purposes: to introduce you to the logic of theory, research, and practice in criminal justice and to give you some practical experience through the use of the SPSS for Windows computer program.
In Chapter 1 you will discover that criminal justice research (like other forms of scientific inquiry) is based on two pillars: logic and observation. You will see how theory (the logic component) informs our investigations, making sense of our observations, and sometimes offers predictions about what weâll find. A particularly important step is formulating a hypothesis that becomes the center of our research. The other aspect of research on which weâll focus in this book is the collection and analysis of data. In criminal justice today, an important way of collecting data is the survey, and this book presents data from several completed surveys. A major way to explore criminal justice is to design and carry out your own survey. This book also helps you plan and implement your own survey. Finally, using official criminal justice system data often is particularly important in our field, so we talk about how to gather data about crime and justice thatâs already been collected or published. We will enter data on how much each of the 50 states spends on its criminal justice system and create a file to which we can add other important data later on.
This chapter also delves more deeply into one central component of scientific inquiry: measurement. We look at some of the criteria for measurement quality and start examining the kinds of measurements represented by the data at hand.
Chapter 2 describes several data sets. One is the General Social Survey (GSS), conducted among a national sample of American adults. The Web page that accompanies this book has a GSS data set and explains how to get any of the data collected by this important national poll since it began in 1972. Another data set is the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, in which thousands of college students at 140 American campuses completed detailed questionnaires about their use of alcohol, their lifestyles, and their experience of crime, among other topics. We also present data about other major criminal justice issues on the Web site.
This bookâs Web site contains data sets that you can use immediately in your exploration of crime and societyâusually all the data youâll need to begin that exploration. But in case you have special research interests, both the book and the Web site also explain how to enter and analyze your own survey data and how to do online analysis of data.
The computer program we will be using, SPSS, is introduced in Chapter 3, where you will learn that there are several different versions of SPSS. Chapter 3 provides you with some initial familiarization with the version youâll be using, and youâll see how it differs from the others available.
The purpose of this book is to lead you through a series of investigative adventures in criminal justice research. We canât predict exactly where these adventures will lead because you are going to be the detective. Our purpose is to show you some simple tools (and some that are truly amazing) that you can use in your investigations. Weâll also provide you with several bodies of dataâcollected in national surveys or by criminal justice agencies throughout the countryâthat are so rich you will have the opportunity to undertake investigations no one else has ever pursued.
The computer is your primary tool for this criminal justice exploration. If you are already comfortable with computers, you can jump right in, and very quickly you will find yourself in the midst of a fascinating computer game. Instead of fighting off alien attacks or escaping from dank dungeons, youâll be pitting your abilities and imagination against real life, finding connections between various social factors and criminal justice concerns.
This tool is also well designed for the creation of college term papers. Throughout, we suggest ways to present the data you discover in the context of a typical term paper in criminal justice or the social sciences. Whereas most students are limited in their term papers to reporting what other investigators have learned about crime and the justice system, you will be able to offer your own insights and discoveries.
Finally, the data sets included here are being analyzed by professional criminologists and other social scientists today. Moreover, the analytical tools weâve provided you are as powerful as those used by many professional researchers. Frankly, thereâs no reason you canât use these materials for original research worthy of publication in a research journal. All it takes is curiosity, imagination, practice, and a healthy obsession with knowing the answers to things. In our experience, what sets professional researchers apart from others is that they have much greater curiosity about the world around them, are able to bring powerful imagination to bear on understanding it, are willing to put in the time needed for effective investigation, and are passionately driven to understand.
Today, the two statistical packages most widely used by social scientists are SPSS1 (the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) and SAS (the Statistical Analysis System). Until the mid-1980s these large, generalized statistical packages were available only for large mainframe computers. The advent of personal computers set off a revolution in how social science data analysis was done. By the mid-1980s, personal computers had become powerful enough to run statistical packages and cheap enough for individuals to purchase. This made it feasible for statistical package producers to rewrite their packages for personal computers. Although personal computers have some limitations, they are very appropriate for moderate data analysis needs.
We have selected SPSS for your use in these exercises for four reasons. First, early versions of SPSS date back to 1968. The package is well known, and there is hardly a criminologist who has earned a graduate degree in the past 30 years who has not had some contact with SPSS. If you are or will be a graduate student in criminal justice, youâre almost certain to want to use SPSS. Second, SPSS takes you through all the basic issues of using a statistical package. This knowledge will give you a head start if you learn some other package later on. (In fact, data sets saved in SPSS can be translated into other statistical packages quite easily.) Third, SPSS lets you access a world of data. The GSS is one of the best sources of data for understanding crime and justice trends in our society, and weâll show you how all its data, and the SPSS instructions necessary to use them, can be accessed through the Internet. Weâll also introduce some of the most important criminal justice databases available from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). NIJ data sets all come with instructions prepared in SPSS, so learning SPSS allows you to investigate important American criminal justice data. Moreover, the World Crime Survey data come complete with SPSS instructions, so you can access an entire world of crime and justice data.
Finally, SPSS comes in several versions, including versions for Windows and Mac operating systems. The present book is designed specifically for the Windows-based version 16 and was specially written for criminal justice researchers and students. Many people have found this latest version to be by far the easiest version to use, thanks in part to the Windows user interface. Earlier versions (SPSS 11.0 through 15.0) are equally easy. The changes in version 16 include some improved menu options and visual appeal.
SPSS is a professional tool used across the social and behavioral sciences. The SPSS company (http://www.spss.com) offers several different types of software packages, ranging in price from $200 to more than $1,000. If you are using this book in a college or university class, your institution probably has a license to use the fully loaded package of SPSS. But there are more affordable, smaller software packages available. Visit their Web site or ask your instructor if you are interested in buying the software for your own use.
The SPSS for Windows Student Version is perfect for students just beginning to learn statistics. This package of the software is limited to fewer variables (only 50) and cases (1,500) and is available only from Prentice Hall (http://www.prenhall.com). Although several of the statistical approaches available in the full version of SPSS for Windows are not available in the Student Version, you will be impressed by how many of the most important techniques are available. The computer requirements for each version of SPSS are presented clearly on each product; call SPSS if you have any questions about these requirements.
The SPSS programmers have made an effort to keep the structure and syntax of all the SPSS versions very similar. If you learn any version, you should have little difficulty using the other versions. You may notice a slight difference in what you see onscreen when you move from version to version.
The exercises designed in this book work with any package of the SPSS software you are using. With a computer, SPSS, and this book in hand, you are ready to start investigating criminal justice issues. We should note that learning how to use SPSS will provide you with a marketable skill in todayâs competitive job market. Many criminal justice agencies can make use of a person who knows how to use software such as SPSS in understanding the huge amount of data they are required to collect.
By the time youâve gone through the chapters in Part I, you should be amply prepared to undertake your adventure in criminal justice research. Welcome! Now letâs get started!
1Terms that appear in boldface in the text are important, and you should be able to define them.
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PREPARING FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH
| Chapter 1 | Theory, Measurement, and Research Development |
Criminal justice research is the detective work of big questions. Whereas a conventional detective tries to find out who committed a specific crime, the criminal justice researcher or criminologist looks for the causes of crime in general. And the logic of criminal justice investigation extends far beyond criminology to include many issues surrounding crime and justice: criminal justice occupations, systems of criminal justice, patterns of crime and correction, juvenile delinquency, the courts, interpersonal violence, mental illness and crime, drug and alcohol useâthe list goes on and on.
Many other issues help us understand crime and justice: social class, race, gender, the state of the economy. In fact, anything that is likely to concern you as an individual is the subject of criminal justice research because so many things are affected by, or play a role in shaping, crime and justice. Criminal justice is a truly multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field: Although many early researchers in this field were drawn from social science areas such as sociology, todayâs criminal justice research uses approaches from all the social sciences and from fields such as management.
1.1 Research in Criminal Justice
This book addresses primarily the techniques of criminal justice data analysis. Therefore weâre going to spend most of our time analyzing data and reaching conclusions about the people who answered questions about crime, justice, substance use, and other issues in two surveys: the General Social Survey (GSS) and the College Alcohol Study. Moreover, weâll discuss how to do your own survey and how to use SPSS to analyze it. The supporting Web site for this book also provides access to other official data about crime and the justice system gathered by state and federal agencies.
Data analysis doesnât occur in a vacuum, however. Scientific inquiry is a matter of both observing and reasoning. Before getting into the techniques of data analysis, then, letâs take a minute to consider the role of theory in conjunction with research and practice.
Given the variety of topics examined in criminal justice research, no single, established set of procedures is always followed in inquiry. Nevertheless, data analysis almost always has a bigger purpose than the simple manipulation of numbers. Our larger aim is to learn something of general value about crime and society. To understand those larger issues, we will first discuss the national agenda for research on crime and then discuss criminological and criminal justice theory.
The federal agency committed to understanding crime is the National Institute of Just...
