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Go to the Disaster Center website
(http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/). Review the crime rate nationally and,
by picking out links to state reports, compare the recent crime rates in two
states. Report on the prevalence of the crimes you have examined. Propose a
causal explanation for variation in crime between states, over time, or both.
What research design would you propose to test this explanation? Explain.

Go to Crime Stoppers USA’s (CSUSA) website
(http://www.crimestoppersusa.org). Check out their profile to read about this
organization. How is CSUSA fighting crime? What does CSUSA’s approach assume
about the cause of crime? Do you think CSUSA’s approach to fighting crime is
based on valid conclusions about causality? Explain.

Bushman (Bushman and Huesmann 2012) tested the impact of
watching a violent video on students’ level of aggressiveness. He found that
watching the violent video increased aggressiveness. Do you consider it ethical
to expose subjects to an intervention that might increase their aggressiveness?
Are there any situations in which you would not approve of such research? Any
types of subjects you would exclude from such research? Any limits you would
draw on the type of intervention that could be tested? Would you impose any
requirements for debriefing?

Lo, Kim, and Cheng (2008) surveyed inmates in county jails. Federal regulations require special safeguards for research on prisoners. Do you think special safeguards are necessary? Why or why not? What type of research would you allow with prisoners: experiments, surveys, observational studies? Do you think it is possible for prisoners to give voluntary consent to research participation? What procedures might help make prisoners’ consent to research truly voluntary?

You learned in Chapter 4 that Sampson and Raudenbush (1999)
had observers drive down neighborhood streets in Chicago and record the level
of disorder they observed. What should have been the observers’ response if
they observed a crime in progress? What if they only suspected that a crime was
going to occur? What if the crime was a drug dealer interacting with a driver
at the curb? What if it was a prostitute soliciting a customer? What, if any,
ethical obligation does a researcher studying a neighborhood have to residents
in that neighborhood? Should research results be shared at a neighborhood
forum?

Under what conditions do you think that randomized
assignment of subjects to a specific treatment is ethical in criminal justice
research? Was it ethical for Sherman and Berk (1984) and the researchers who conducted
the replication studies to randomly assign individuals accused of domestic
violence to an arrest or nonarrest treatment? What about in a laboratory study
with students like yourself? Do you think it would be ethical to assign
students randomly to different groups, with some receiving stressful stimuli
such as loud noises?
SPSS or Excel excerises

(a)Take a look at some of the variables in this dataset. Is
the MTF dataset suited to nomothetic or idiographic explanations? Why?
(b) The link between a parent’s education and a child’s
subsequent outcomes is well documented in many different fields, from
criminology to health. Let’s look at the relationship between a parent’s
education level and whether a respondent has ever been suspended from school.
1. State a hypothesis about the relationship between parent
education and suspension.
2. Construct a cross tab for the variables lowparenteduc and
V7234 by selecting analyze->descriptives- >cross-tabs. Make sure to put
the independent variable in the column box and to select column cell
percentages.
3. What does this tell us about the relationship between
the two variables?
4. Do we have sufficient evidence to say that this is a
causal relationship? Which criteria of causality are met, and which are not?
5. What else do you think we might want to account for to
ensure that this is not a spurious relationship?
6. Think of at least three intervening variables/causal
mechanisms through which parents’ education might influence their children’s
risk of poor school performance.

Let’s elaborate on this by accounting for a potential
confounder. Some have argued that race is critical to understanding school
discipline. They suggest that low parent education and suspension are both
correlated with a parent/respondent’s race. Therefore, race may be a confounder
in this relationship, raising the possibility that education doesn’t matter
after all. We can control for the effect of race by constructing a layered
cross-tab, which will look at the relationship between parent education and
school suspension in whites and blacks separately.
1. Go back to the cross-tab menu. This time, add the
variable white to the “layer” field.
2. The result here will be a bit daunting at first glance,
but what you are looking for is whether the pattern you found in Exercise 2 is
present in the nonwhite subgroup and the white subgroup. If the effect is not
present for one group, you have a partial confounder, where the relationship
between the two variables is present only for certain groups. If the
relationship goes away when
you account for this new variable, you have found a
confounder, and the original relationship might have been spurious.
3. In this case, is race not a confounder, a partial
confounder, or a total confounder?
4. Does having parents with low education influence the
risk of suspension for whites? For blacks? What does this tell us about our
society and how punishment is distributed in schools?
4. Based on the measures in this dataset, what type of
design do you think this study is using—longitudinal or cross sectional? What
are the strengths and limitations of this approach? Test your understanding of
the chapter content. Take the practice quiz.

Design a true experiment to determine whether alcohol
consumption leads to increased violent attitudes or actions. Describe how your
design incorporates the three components of experiments. Evaluate how well your
design meets the criteria for identifying causality. What are the ethical
issues you face in this experiment?

Select a true experiment from the Journal of Experimental
Criminology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, or sources suggested by your instructor.
Diagram the experiment using Exhibits 7.3 and 7.4 in this chapter as models.
Discuss the extent to which experimental conditions were controlled and the
causal mechanism was identified. How confident can you be in the causal
conclusions from the study, based on review of the threats to internal validity
discussed in this chapter: selection bias, endogenous change, external events,
contamination, and treatment misidentification?