AJ 301-O2A Research Methods in Administration of Justice

Week

Items

One

Chapter:1 Criminal Justice and Scientific Inquiry

• Understand why knowledge of research methods is valuable to criminal justice professionals.
• Describe the different ways we know things.
• Recognize that much of our knowledge is based on agreement rather than on direct experience.
• Understand the role of experience and systematic observation in criminal justice research.
• Distinguish the different purposes of research.
• Understand how to design a research project.
• Be able to conduct a review of research literature.
• Describe how to write a research proposal.

Two

Chapter one continued.

Three

Chapter:2 Ethics and Criminal Justice Research

• Understand why researchers may not recognize whether their own work adequately addresses ethical issues.
• Summarize how ethical questions usually involve weighing the possible benefits of research against the potential harm to research subjects.
• Understand the norm of voluntary participation and how it can conflict with generalizability.
• Describe examples of the special ethical questions sometimes raised by criminal justice research.
• Discuss how informed consent addresses many ethical questions.
• Distinguish anonymity and confidentiality as ways to protect the privacy of research subjects.
• Summarize ethical principles presented in the Belmont Report.
• Describe why prisoners and juveniles require special ethical considerations.
• Understand the role of institutional review boards (IRBs) in protecting human subjects.

Four

Chapter:3 General Issues in Research Design

• Understand the foundations of social science: theory, data collection, and data analysis.
• Recognize the fundamental differences between social sciences and other ways of looking at social phenomena: talk language of theory, not philosophy; aggregates, not individuals, and language.
• Understand differing Avenues for inquiry; distinguish idiographic from nomothetic explanations; inductive from deductive reasoning; quantitative and qualitative approaches
• Recognize how explanatory scientific research centres on the notion of cause and effect and the three basic requirements for establishing a causal relationship in science.
• Understand the role of validity and threats to the validity of causal inference.
• Describe different units of analysis in criminal justice research, and the possibility of ecological fallacy.
• Understand the time dimension, together with the differences between cross-sectional and longitudinal research.

Five

Chapter:4 Concepts, Operationalisation and Measurements

• Understand the role of concepts as summary devices for bringing together observations and experiences that have something in common.
• Explain how concepts are mental images that do not exist in the real world.
• Describe how operationalization specifies concrete empirical procedures for measuring variables.
• Recognize that operationalization begins with study design but continues through the duration of research.
• Explain why measurement categories must be mutually exclusive and exhaustive.
• Distinguish different levels of measurement and the properties of different levels.
• Understand precision, reliability, and validity as dimensions of measurement quality.
• Recognize how different approaches to measuring crime illustrate general principles of conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement.
• Understand what crimes are included in different measures.
• Describe different measures of crime and how they are based on different units of analysis.
• Understand different purposes for collecting crime data.
• Explain different measures based on crimes known to police.
• Describe the main features of victim surveys.
• Distinguish the main differences between crimes known to police and crimes measured through different types of surveys.
• Understand why self-report measures are used and list different types of crimes for which they are appropriate.
• Summarize major series of self-reported measures of drug use.

Six

Chapter 4 Continued

Seven

Chapter:5 Experiments and Quasi-Experimental Designs

• Recognize that experiments are well suited for the controlled testing of causal processes and for some evaluation studies.
• Describe how the classical experiment tests the effect of an experimental stimulus on some dependent variable through the pretesting and post-testing of experimental and control groups.
• Describe how random assignment is the best way to achieve comparability in the experimental and control groups.
• Describe how the classical experiment with random assignment of subjects guards against most of the threats to internal invalidity.
• Understand that the controlled conditions under which experiments take place may restrict our ability to generalize results to real-world constructs or to other settings.
• Recognize how the classical experiment may be modified by changing the number of experimental and control groups, the number and types of experimental stimuli, and the number of pretest or posttest measurements.
• Know the reasons that quasi-experiments are conducted when it is not possible or desirable to use an experimental design and be able to describe different categories of quasi-experiments.

Eight

Chapter Five Continued

Nine

Spring Break No Classes

Ten

Chapter:6 Sampling

• Understand how the logic of probability sampling makes it possible to represent large populations with small subsets of those populations.
• Recognize that the chief criterion of a sample’s quality is the degree to which it is representative of the population from which it was selected.
• Summarize the chief principle of probability sampling: every member of the population has a known, nonzero probability of being selected into the sample.
• Describe how probability sampling methods make it possible to select samples that will be quite representative.
• Recognize how simple random sampling is logically the most fundamental technique in probability sampling.

Eleven

Chapter:7 Survey Research

• Understand that survey research involves the administration of questionnaires in a systematic way to a sample of respondents selected from some population
• Describe how survey research is especially appropriate for descriptive or exploratory studies of large populations.
• Describe examples of surveys as the method of choice for obtaining victimisation and self-reported offending data
• Summarize differences between open-ended or closed-ended questions, and offer examples of the advantages and disadvantages of each.
• Recognize how bias in questionnaire items encourages respondents to answer in a particular way or to support a particular point of view.
• Describe the three different ways to administer questionnaires, and offer examples of how they can be varied
• Provide examples of the advantages and disadvantages of each method of survey administration.

Twelve

Chapter:9 Field Observation

• Discuss how survey data can be somewhat artificial and potentially superficial
• Be able to describe field research as a data collection method that involves the direct observation of phenomena in their natural settings.
• Recognize that field observation is usually the preferred data collection method for obtaining information about physical or social settings, behaviour, and events.
• Understand that field research in criminal justice may produce either qualitative or quantitative data.
• Recognize what sampling techniques are best suited for field research, and when they can be used.
• Recognize the alternatives for recording field observations, ranging from video, audio, and other equipment to unstructured field notes.
• Understand how field notes are taken, and be able to describe different ways to combine structure and flexibility in field notes.
• Summarize how field research measures validity and reliability.

Thirteen

Chapter:10 Agency Records, Content Analysis and Secondary Data

• Recognize that public organizations produce statistics and data that are often useful for criminal justice researchers.