Handbook of Scales for Research in Crime and Delinquency

Handbook of Scales for Research in Crime and Delinquency
Author: Stanley L. Brodsky
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2013-06-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1461333008

In contrast to the great diversity of other crime and delinquency research measures, those drawn from the CPI and the MMPI have much in common. They are taken from standardized instruments administered under controlled conditions, with known stimulus properties and validity indicators. The CPI and MMPI measures will frequently be instruments of choice in research on personality and psychodynamics of offenders. CHAPTER 6 Law Enforcement and Police This chapter encompasses a variety of scales that refer to law enforcement or police agencies. Unfortunately, in the case of many scales, these terms are used simply with the assumption that the respondents understand the concepts and use them in the same way as researchers. In other cases, however, specific policing functions are identified and described. As noted in Chapter 3, a standard order of scale presentation is followed. First the attitudes scales are presented, followed by the behavior ratings, per sonality measures, milieu ratings, prediction measures and finally the very broad category of description. After the reviews are completed within each subcategory, other scales in that category are listed. (See Chapter 2 for a description of the criteria that were used in deciding upon whether a scale would be reviewed or simply listed. ) Listed scales are presented by title and bibliographic reference, followed by a very brief description.

Handbook of Quantitative Criminology

Handbook of Quantitative Criminology
Author: Alex R. Piquero
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 787
Release: 2009-12-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0387776508

Quantitative criminology has certainly come a long way since I was ?rst introduced to a largely qualitative criminology some 40 years ago, when I was recruited to lead a task force on science and technology for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. At that time, criminology was a very limited activity, depending almost exclusively on the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) initiated by the FBI in 1929 for measurement of crime based on victim reports to the police and on police arrests. A ty- cal mode of analysis was simple bivariate correlation. Marvin Wolfgang and colleagues were makingan importantadvancebytrackinglongitudinaldata onarrestsin Philadelphia,an in- vation that was widely appreciated. And the ?eld was very small: I remember attending my ?rst meeting of the American Society of Criminology in about 1968 in an anteroom at New York University; there were about 25–30 people in attendance, mostly sociologists with a few lawyers thrown in. That Society today has over 3,000 members, mostly now drawn from criminology which has established its own clear identity, but augmented by a wide variety of disciplines that include statisticians, economists, demographers, and even a few engineers. This Handbook provides a remarkable testimony to the growth of that ?eld. Following the maxim that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t understand it,” we have seen the early dissatisfaction with the UCR replaced by a wide variety of new approaches to measuring crime victimization and offending.

The Handbook of Measurement Issues in Criminology and Criminal Justice

The Handbook of Measurement Issues in Criminology and Criminal Justice
Author: Beth M. Huebner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 604
Release: 2016-04-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1118868765

This volume of the series was designed to provide a comprehensive primer on the existing best practices and emerging developments in the study and design research on crime and criminology. The work as a whole includes chapters on the measurement of criminal typologies, the offenders, offending and victimization, criminal justice organizations, and specialized measurement techniques. Each chapter is written by experts in the field and they provide an excellent survey of the literature in the relevant area. More importantly, each chapter provides a description of the various methodological and substantive challenges presented in conducting research on these issues and denotes possible solutions to these dilemmas. An emphasis was placed on research that has been conducted outside of the United States and was designed to give the reader a broader more global understanding of the social context of research. The goal of this volume is to provide a definitive reference for professionals in the field, researchers, and students. This volume in the Handbooks in Criminology and Criminal Justice series identifies the principal topical areas of research in this field and summarizes the various methodological and substantive challenges presented in conducting research on these issues. In each chapter, authors provide a summary of the prominent data collection efforts in the topical area, provide an overview of the current methodological work, discuss the challenges in the measurement of central concepts in the subject area, and identify new horizons emerging in data collection and measurement. We encouraged authors to discuss work conducted in an international context and to incorporate discussion of qualitative methodologies when appropriate.

Handbook of Crime Correlates

Handbook of Crime Correlates
Author: Lee Ellis
Publisher: Academic Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2009-05-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0080920098

Over the past two centuries, many aspects of criminal behavior have been investigated. Finding this information and making sense of it all is difficult when many studies would appear to offer contradictory findings. The Handbook of Crime Correlates collects in one source the summary analysis of crime research worldwide. It provides over 400 tables that divide crime research into nine broad categories: Pervasiveness and intra-offending relationships Demographic factors Ecological and macroeconomic factors Family and peer factors Institutional factors Behavioral and personality factors Cognitive factors Biological factors Crime victimization and fear of crime Within these broad categories, tables identify regions of the world and how separate variables are or are not positively or negatively associated with criminal behavior. Criminal behavior is broken down into separate offending categories of violent crime, property crime, drug offenses, sex offenses, delinquency, general and adult offenses, and recidivism. Accompanying each table is a description of what each table indicates in terms of the positive or negative association of specific variables with specific types of crime by region. This book should serve as a valuable resource for criminal justice personnel and academics in the social and life sciences interested in criminal behavior.

Measuring Crime and Criminality

Measuring Crime and Criminality
Author: John MacDonald
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2011-12-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1412844436

Measuring Crime and Criminality focuses on how different approaches to measuring crime and criminality are used to test existing criminological theories. Each chapter reviews a key approach for measuring criminal behavior and discusses its strengths or weaknesses for explaining the facts of crime or answers to central issues of criminological inquiry. The book describes the state of the field on different approaches for measuring crime and criminality as seen by prominent scholars in the field. Among the featured contributions are: The Use of Official Reports and Victimization Data for Testing Criminological Theories; The Design and Analysis of Experiments in Criminology; and Growth Curve/Mixture Models for Measuring Criminal Careers. Also included are papers titled: Counterfactual Methods of Causal Inference and Their Application to Criminology; Measuring Gene-Environment Interactions in the Cause of Antisocial Behavior and What Has Been Gained and Lost through Longitudinal Research and Advanced Statistical Models? This volume of Advances in Criminological Theory illustrates how understanding the various ways criminal behavior is measured is useful for developing theoretical insights on the causes of crime.

The Science of Crime Measurement

The Science of Crime Measurement
Author: Martin A. Andresen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2014-01-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135006261

Crime statistics are ubiquitous in modern society – but how accurate are they? This book investigates the science of crime measurement focussing on four main questions: how do we count crime? How do we calculate crime rates? Are there other measurements of crime? What are the issues surrounding crime statistics? All too often we take the measurement of crime at face value when there is, in fact, a science behind it. This book specifically deals with issues related to spatially-referenced crime data that are used to analyse crime patterns across the urban environment. The first section of the book considers alternative crime rate calculations. The second section of the book contains a thorough discussion of a measure of crime specialisation. Finally, the third section of the book addresses a number of aggregation issues that are present with such data: crime type aggregations, temporal aggregations of crime data, the stability of crime patterns over time, and the importance of spatial scale. This book builds on a growing body of literature on the science of crime measurement and offers a comprehensive account of this growing subfield of criminology. The book speaks to wider debates in the fields of crime analysis, environmental criminology and crime prevention and will be perfect reading for advanced level undergraduate and graduate students looking to find out more about the measurement of crime.