Research Methods in Crime and Justice

Brian L. Withrow, Brian Withrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138124226
• eBook ISBN: 9781317300663
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Research Methods in Crime and Justice, 2nd Edition, is an innovative text/online hybrid for undergraduate Criminal Justice Research Methods courses. This material uniquely addresses the fundamental teaching issue for this course: how to show students that success as criminal justice practitioners is linked to their acquisition of research skills.

Brian Withrow, a widely published academic researcher and former Texas State Trooper, developed this approach for his own undergraduate Research Methods class. He persuasively demonstrates that research skills aren't just essential to university academic researchers but to successful criminal justice practitioners as well. More than 80 short, sharply focused examples throughout the text rely on research that is conducted by, on behalf of, or relevant to criminal justice practitioners to engage students' interest like no other text of its kind. Extensive web materials all written by the author provide an array of instructor support material, including a Researcher's Notebook that provides students (and their instructors) with a series of structured exercises leading to the development of a valid research project. Withrow systematically walks students through defining a question, conducting a literature review, and designing a research method that provides the data necessary to answer the research question—all online, with minimal instructor supervision.

The second edition features expanded coverage of measurement, qualitative research methods, and evaluation research methods, as well as additional downloadable journal articles to ensure students begin to think critically about research and can read scholarly literature.

Part One
Getting Started

Chapter 1 The Research Practice

So, here you are in a research methods class. Hopefully, the email at the start of the book convinced you that this course will be valuable to you as a criminal justice practitioner or even just an everyday consumer of information. But, what are research methods exactly? Essentially, research methods are the tools, techniques, and procedures that researchers use to ask and answer questions. In this book, we will focus on questions that relate to criminal justice. Some of these questions are routine:

• How many police officers are there in the United States?
• How much do we spend annually on prisons?

Other questions are more complicated:

• Why does a person become a serial murderer?
• Can a violent offender be rehabilitated?

In Chapter 2, you will learn how these questions are asked and answered. For now, we will spend some time learning about the practice of research in general. What exactly do we mean by ‘research’? Why is it so important?

Getting to the Point 1.1—Research methods are the tools, techniques, and procedures that researchers use to ask and answer questions.

What is Research?

What do people mean when they say, “I did a little research, and …” or “The research indicates … ?” The term ‘research’ actually has two meanings. First, research is a verb. To research means to follow a logical process that uses concepts, principles, and techniques to produce knowledge. We do research every day to inform important decisions. For example, when looking to buy a new car, you may want to research the car’s safety record, gas mileage, resale value, and so on. By carefully finding and evaluating this information, you can make an informed buying decision.

In the field of criminal justice, research is often more complicated. For example, a study analyzing the effectiveness of various offender rehabilitation programs might require more forethought and rigor. What do we mean by ‘rehabilitation’? Do we mean that offenders do not reoffend or that they are rehabilitated in some other way? What types of offenders are we talking about? Are we talking about sex offenders or armed burglars? How will we know if the rehabilitation program actually works? Should it be considered effective if 50 percent of the offenders are rehabilitated? Or should we measure effectiveness in some other way? These are all questions we would have to consider before we even started to research this issue.

Research is also a noun. In this case, research refers to a collection of information that represents what we know about a particular topic. Research that informs everyday decisions can be found in newspapers and magazines, on the television, and through other forms of media like the Internet. A segment on NBC Today, for example, might feature an expert talking about a new study on effective parenting techniques. This information can be supplemented with information from books and magazines to form a body of information that a person draws upon when making decisions about how to raise his or her children. Academic research is usually found in academic journals, academic books, and formal reports. Information in these sources is usually more technical and may involve contributions from multiple academic disciplines. Research on domestic violence, for example, spans many disciplines (e.g. law, psychology, criminology, sociology, etc.) and constitutes an enormous literature.

Getting to the Point 1.2—As a verb, ‘research’ means to follow a logical process that uses concepts, principles, and techniques to produce knowledge. As a noun, ‘research’ is a collection of information that represents what we know about a particular topic.

Whether used as a verb or noun, the critical element of research is the method or process by which the researcher collects and analyzes information. The research method is especially important in the social sciences because social science topics are often difficult to study. Chemists follow a fairly consistent research process because the standards of measurement are generally agreed upon. Social scientists are not so fortunate; there are many different ways to measure concepts related to social relations and structure.

For example, the popular website e-Harmony.com provides matchmaking services that are based on the potential compatibility between two people. But, how do we measure compatibility? Should compatibility be based on hobbies and leisure interests? Political beliefs and core values? Level of education and occupation? There may be many ways of measuring compatibility and, thus, many ways of interpreting the success of a match between two people. As a result, we need to know how the social scientists at e-Harmony.com came to their conclusions. How did they measure their concepts, collect their data, and analyze the results? In the social sciences, how you know is as important as what you know.

Getting to the Point 1.3—Research in the social sciences is more challenging than in the physical sciences because the concepts that social scientists study are more difficult to measure and the findings that social scientists produce are more difficult to interpret.

Why Do Research?

Conducting good research is tedious and time consuming. It is not uncommon for a research project to take months, years, or even decades to complete. Often, there are no guarantees that a research project will even produce the information the researcher is seeking. So, why bother with research? Certainly, there are other ways of gathering information, which I will discuss below, but, as I will suggest, these methods are not as good at producing quality information as the tried and true methods of conducting research.

Over Relying on Authority

One of the common alternatives to research methods is to rely on authority. There are a lot of smart and well-informed people in the world, such as parents and professors. We could simply rely on them to tell us the truth. The problem here is that parents and, yes, even professors can be wrong.

Science, and therefore knowledge, changes constantly. For example, we used to think that criminal suspects who fled in vehicles were best apprehended by large numbers of police officers in fast cars equipped with bright flashing lights and loud sirens. Eventually, we learned that the only thing worse than one car traveling through a city at high speed is multiple cars traveling at high speed. High-speed chases often result in death, serious injury, and/or property damage. So, researchers devised safer, more effective ways to apprehend fleeing criminal suspects.

Over Relying on Tradition

Instead of doing research, we could also rely on tradition or custom. Most of what we do every day is based on tradition or habit. We hold open doors for people behind us. We eat lunch at noon. We put people in jail because we think the threat of jail will keep people from committing crime. To be sure, some traditions are good, but over-reliance on traditions can be harmful.

In 1896, the United States Supreme Court established the ‘separate but equal doctrine’ in Plessy v. Ferguson (163 US 537, 1896), which held that individuals could be segregated by race. For years, this doctrine upheld a tradition of separate facilities for African American and White individuals, including separate seating areas in restaurants, separate school systems, and even separate drinking fountains. At the time, the Court believed that mixing the races in social situations would cause social friction and public conflict.

Fifty-eight years later, a unanimous Supreme Court reversed itself and ruled in Brown v. The Board of Education (347 US 483, 1954) that separate could not be equal. In delivering the opinion of the Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren cited the research of psychologists and sociologists that showed that racial segregation causes harm to children. In this case, social science research instigated a substantial change in American legal and social tradition.

Over Relying on Common Sense

A third option in lieu of research is to just rely on common sense. Common sense is information that we have learned from our experiences or through our interactions with others. It is what we believe to be true. One of my father’s favorite expressions was, “That guy is educated well beyond his level of intelligence.” He meant that the person lacked common sense. Common sense can be valuable, but sometimes it does not serve us well.

For example, during the 1700s, England faced a substantial increase in crime. In response, the government increased criminal penalties such that even minor criminals, like pickpockets, were executed. The English government was responding to the common-sense notion that increased penalties would deter would-be criminals.

Did it work? Not really. Crime continued to increase, and, in an infamous diary from the time, a pickpocket instructed new pickpockets to focus on victims in public crowds who were paying attention to something else, like the hanging of a convicted pickpocket (Anderson, 2002). So much for common sense.

Over Relying on the Media

Finally, we can rely on the media—television, radio, newspapers, and the Internet—to tell us information. Unfortunately, some media sources are biased and/or get the story wrong, and a good portion of media sources do not provide sufficient context.

For example, the media reported that from 2003 to 2009 there were 4,688 American and Allied casualties in the Iraq War. But, these sources do not put this figure in context. During the Civil War (1861–1865), 618,000 Americans died. Furthermore, on a single day during World War II (D-Day, June 6, 1944), approximately 10,249 American and Allied soldiers died. These comparisons are not intended to diminish the death toll from the Iraq War, but they do suggest that context matters and that the media often miss this point. More often than not, competition between media outlets to ‘get the story first’ ignores the importance of ‘getting the story right.’ Below is an example.

Making Research Real 1.1—The Katrina Crime Wave That Wasn’t

In August 2005, a powerful hurricane (Katrina) ravaged the Gulf Coast and all but destroyed large sections of New Orleans, Louisiana. Thousands of people found themselves homeless. Many were given shelter in mobile homes provided by the US Federal Emergency Management Administration. Even more were displaced to cities, large and small, throughout the nation.

During the evacuation period, Houston, Texas saw its population rise 7 percent as it welcomed nearly a quarter of a million former residents of New Orleans. Almost immediately, Houston police and criminal justice officials began reporting sharp increases in crime, particularly homicides, robberies, and automobile theft. Most of these increases were blamed on individuals displaced by Katrina. The perception that the Katrina evacuees were causing an increase in crime became pervasive in the community, in large part due to extensive media coverage.

In 2010, five researchers decided to investigate these media claims. They evaluated official crime statistics from three cities (Houston, San Antonio, and Phoenix), all of which had received large numbers of Katrina evacuees. For each city, they examined pre- and post-Katrina crime trends in six offense categories: murder, robbery, aggravated assault, rape, burglary, and auto theft. The evidence suggested that crime rates for each of the offenses were more or less the same in each city before and after the relocation of Katrina evacuees (Verano et al., 2010). Only in Houston was there a modest increase in murder and robbery after Katrina evacuees arrived.

In the end, we have good reasons for conducting research. Research involves the systematic process of testing our claims and evaluating our knowledge. When those claims or that knowledge is not supported by evidence, they are discarded and new ideas emerge. Research ensures that the policies and procedures we use to address crime and other social problems are effective. In short, there is just no substitute for good research (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Limitations of the Alternatives to Research

Alternatives	Limitations
Authority	Sometimes exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: What’s the Point of This Course?
• Part One—Getting Started
• Part Two—Learning Research Design Basics
• Part Three—Acquiring and Analyzing Data
• Epilogue: How Do You Know What You Know?
• References
• Glossary/Index