The Routledge International Handbook of Violence Studies

Walter S. DeKeseredy, Callie Marie Rennison, Amanda K. Hall-Sanchez, Walter S. DeKeseredy, Callie Marie Rennison, Amanda K. Hall-Sanchez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351981545
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Violence is a serious public health problem. The number of violent deaths tells only part of the story, and many more survive violence and are left with permanent physical and emotional scars. Violence also erodes communities by reducing productivity, decreasing property values, and disrupting social services.

In recent years, scholars have broadened their definitions of violence beyond the realm of interpersonal harms such as murder, armed robbery, and male-to-female physical and sexual assaults in intimate relationships, to include behaviors often ignored by the criminal justice system, such as human rights violations, racism, psychological abuse, state terrorism, environmental violations, and war. Guided by this broader definition of violence, this handbook offers state of the art research in the field and brings together international experts to discuss empirical, theoretical, and policy issues.

Part I

Gathering and analyzing violence data

Introduction to Part I¹

Walter S. DeKeseredy, Callie Marie Rennison, and Amanda K. Hall-Sanchez

Be a good craftsman: Avoid any rigid set of procedures. Above all, seek to develop and to use the sociological imagination. Avoid the fetishism of method and technique. Urge the rehabilitation of the unpretentious intellectual craftsman, and try to become such a craftsman yourself. Let every man be his own methodologist: let every man be his own theorist; let theory and method again become part of the practice of a craft. Stand for the primacy of the individual scholar; stand opposed to the ascendancy of research teams of technicians. Be one mind that is on its own confronting the problems of man and society.

(Mills, 1959, p. 224)

The editors of this handbook have a number of things in common and one of them is a dedication to producing feminist scholarship that meets the highest disciplinary standards. Then, given that he was not a feminist, why did we begin this introduction to Part I by quoting C. Wright Mills? Our rationale for doing so is that we strongly agree with his opposition to abstracted empiricism. Such work is referred to by Young (2004) as “voodoo criminology” and by Currie (2007) as “so what? criminology.” It involves atheoretical quantitative research on relatively minor issues and presenting the findings in an unintelligible fashion. In 2011, the late Jock Young, a great admirer of Mills, observed that “abstracted empiricism has expanded on a level which would have surely astonished Mills himself” (p. viii). It is even worse today than ever before, especially in the United States. Positivism and empiricism dominate mainstream American criminology, and the journals Criminology and Criminology and Public Policy are major examples of this orthodox way of thinking.² More is said about abstracted empiricism in Chapter 3, but it should be emphasized here that there are imaginative ways of doing criminological research, and all the chapters included in Part I provide good examples of how to collect and analyze meaningful data on various types of violence.

Which method should one use? In our own case, we couldn’t agree more with Stubbs’s (2008) claim that “the appropriate method depends on the research objectives” (p. 13). As Walter DeKeseredy states in Chapter 3, regardless of one’s theoretical, empirical, or political standpoint, it is always essential to remember that any research method is a tool that can be used in a variety of ways, and the topic should determine the method selected. What is more, although any of the methods discussed in this section of the handbook and in other sources provide a rich vein of information on violence and societal reactions to violence, the tendency has been to rely only on one research technique, even though this fosters “methodological parochialness” (Hotaling & Sugarman, 1986). Of course, research designs often are determined by time and funding limitations. Ideally, however, social scientists who study violence and other issues should be open-minded and attempt a mixed-methods approach, in what has been called “data triangulation” (Denzin, 1978). What Berg (1995) stated nearly a quarter of a century ago still holds true today:

By combining several lines of sight, researchers obtain a better, more substantive picture of reality; a richer more complete array of symbols and theoretical concepts; and a means of verifying many of these elements.

(p. 4)

Kai Thaler devotes more attention to mixed methods in the study of violence in Chapter 2, but perhaps another example of a combination of techniques would be useful here. Claire Renzetti (1992) conducted a groundbreaking study of battering in lesbian relationships. She used a feminist participatory research model that not only involved the investigation stage, but also included a design to help educate both the researcher and the participants, and it was committed to social action afterwards to apply the new knowledge to finding solutions. Renzetti identified a topic for which neither field observation nor participant observation by an academic researcher was likely to yield significant data. In this model, her first step was to establish the entire basis of the study as a collaborative effort with a battered lesbian support group. This group, who certainly had real-life experiences as observers and participants, worked as equal partners in developing the study. Renzetti points out:

I developed the first draft of the questionnaire, but it soon became clear that while I brought to the project technical skills in research methodology and data analysis, I knew far less about lesbian relationships than I had originally presumed. The questionnaire went through six drafts over a period of nine months.

(p. 9)

Only then could recruitment of volunteers (victims of lesbian relationship battering) begin, so that anonymous written questionnaires could be distributed. It was much later before a recruited group of these women could be interviewed face to face to provide more information than could be gleaned from answers on a questionnaire.

Obviously, some methods are absent from Part I, which should not be interpreted as our rejection of their utility. Rather, our view (and that of many other scholars) is that every method has strengths and limitations. Unfortunately, too many researchers are “methodological narcissists” who contend that their favorite approach is the best method (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1996). This is particularly a problem when different methods yield such different results. Carl Pope (1984), for instance, has shown how the different findings about the effects of race on crime rates often can be attributed to the different methods being used. We, and the authors of the six chapters in Part I, subscribe to the alternative school of thought: that there is no one correct method, but rather a method or combination of methods that will best suit your needs in a given research context. “A research method for a given problem is not like the solution to a problem in Algebra. It is more like a recipe for beef stroganoff: there is no one best recipe” (Simon, 1978, p. 4). As well, we should always remember Eric Schmidt’s statement on the back cover of Flexner’s (2017) The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge: Our research should always be “driven by curiosity, freedom, and imagination.”

Notes

1 This introduction to Part I includes modified sections of work published previously by DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1996, 2013).

2 These two periodicals are the official journals of the American Society of Criminology.

References

Berg, B. (1995). Qualitative research methods for the social sciences. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Currie, E. (2007). Against marginality: Arguments for a public criminology. Theoretical Criminology, 11, 7–18.

DeKeseredy, W. S., & Schwartz, M. D. (1996). Contemporary criminology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

DeKeseredy, W. S., & Schwartz, M. D. (2013). Male peer support & violence against women: The history and verification of a theory. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.

Denzin, N. (1978). The research act. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Flexner, A. (2017). The usefulness of useless knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hotaling, G., & Sugarman, D. (1986). An analysis of risk markers and husband to wife violence: The current state of knowledge. Violence and Victims, 1, 101–124.

Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pope, C. (1984). Race, crime, and criminological research. In M. D. Schwartz & D. O. Friedrichs (Eds.), Humanist perspectives in crime and justice (pp. 46–59). Hebron, CT: Practitioner Press.

Renzetti, C. M. (1992). Violent betrayal: Partner abuse in lesbian relationships. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Simon, J. (1978). Basic research methods in social sciences: The art of empirical investigation. New York: Random House.

Stubbs, J. (2008). Critical criminological research. In T. Anthony & C. Cunneen (Eds.), The critical criminology companion (pp. 6–17). Annandale, NSW: Hawkins Press.

Young, J. (2004). Voodoo criminology and the numbers game. In J. Ferrell, K. Hayward, W. Morrison, & M. Presdee (Eds.), Cultural criminology unleashed (pp. 13–28). London: The Glasshouse Press.

Young, J. (2011). The criminological imagination. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

1

Crime victimization survey research

Callie Marie Rennison and Martin D. Schwartz

Introduction

How much crime victimization is there in the United States each year, and how is it distributed? Perhaps more relevant here, how is it counted? Politicians often announce that crime has gone up or down, but where do they get this information? Much more important is that the way in which the question is asked has a strong effect on the received answer. For example, one could measure the amount of rape by looking at annual convictions in criminal courts. However, particularly for sexual assault that is not accompanied by obvious major physical injury, this is a crime that is massively underreported to the police, under-investigated by the police, and most often only prosecuted when a victim acts in the way that comports with the prosecutor’s beliefs about proper or real victims (O’Neal, Tellis, & Spohn, 2015).

In this paper, we will discuss the history, development, changes, and future of the most important victimization survey in the US, the National Crime Victimization Survey.

Getting a handle on the extent of crime and victimization has long been of interest in the US, and efforts to understand it date back to the beginnings of the nation. When establishing the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 1790, Congress mandated that it report crime statistics. Mandate or not, nothing was done until 1927 when law enforcement officials attending the convention of the National Police Association (later known as the International Association of Chiefs of Police [IACP]) formed the Committee on the Uniform Crime Records.¹ The purpose of the Committee was to develop a program and procedures for uniformly collecting information about crime across jurisdictions in the United States. In this manner, although there are variations in state laws and definitions across the country, the goal was to introduce standard definitions in crime reports that would allow comparisons across cities, states, and regions. This effort ultimately resulted in the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program housed in the DOJ that continues today to gather crime data from law enforcement agencies.

Although it serves many important purposes, the UCR Program is limited because it only provides information about that portion of crime reported to the police and formally recorded by them. Concern over missing data, and rising rates of crime in the early 1960s, led President Johnson in 1965 to convene two Commissions on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. The Commissions were instructed to identify the causes and characteristics of crime, as well as recommend policies and programs to address crime (President’s Commission, 1967). One conclusion reached by the Commissions was the need for additional crime data complementing the efforts of the UCR to understand better the nature and extent of the dark figure of crime—that is, crime unknown to the police. What was possible to learn about crime that was not reported to the police?

In response, in 1968 the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (later renamed the Office of Justice Programs) was established, including what is now known as the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). One of BJS’s earliest tasks was to design and conduct a national crime victimization survey in the United States. Unlike data gathered by police agencies, crime victimization surveys were designed to gather information directly from victims of crime. This approach meant that it could identify crime that both is and is not reported to the police. In other words, it could identify at least some of the dark figure of crime.

The result of this work was the National Crime Panel, launched in 1972 to include four distinct samples: two household samples (known as the National Crime Survey [NCS]) and two commercial establishment samples (the Commercial Victimization Survey [CVS]). The CVS originally included a sample of 2,000 commercial establishments in 26 large cities and a sample of 15,000 businesses across the nation (Rennison & Rand, 2007). The NCS initially included a central city household sample in 26 large cities and a national probability sample of 72,000 households. Quickly, budgetary and methodological issues thwarted this full effort, and the CVS and the central cities samples were discontinued. By 1976, only the national probability household sample of the National Crime Panel remained: the NCS (Rennison & Rand, 2007).

Since its inception, the NCS has collected data on criminal victimizations against persons and crimes against households. Victimization data are gathered throughout the year both in person and over the phone at a sample of housing units in the United States. Housing units are selected using a stratified, multistage, cluster sample. Individuals age 12 or older residing in households in the survey are interviewed every 6 months for a total of seven interviews. This methodological approach means that the data collected are representative of all housing units in the nation, and the data provide a representative sample of noninstitutionalized individuals age 12 or older in the United States (Rennison & Rand, 2007).

Two related survey instruments are used to collect the victimization data. The first survey instrument serves as a screening instrument that asks questions to identify if a respondent was a victim of a threatened, attempted, or completed crime during the preceding 6 months (Rennison & Rand, 2007). If the screening instrument uncovers a possible criminal victimization, a second incident-focused survey instrument is used to collect detailed characteristics about the potential victimization. Details gathered include the victim, offender, and incident characteristics, information about the type of crime, the time and location of the incident, the numbers of victims, bystanders, and offenders, weapon presence, injuries sustained, medical care sought, interactions with the police (if any), to name a few.

An important methodological characteristic of the survey is the way that the incident data gathered from the incident report are used. First, the detailed incident information is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Credits
• List of contributors
• Introduction Toward a broader social scientific understanding of violence
• PART I: Gathering and analyzing violence data
• PART II: New ways of thinking theoretically about violence
• PART III: Select topics in violence studies
• PART IV: New policy directions
• Index