Category: Writing

1.  If the individual has engaged in delinquency, consider
drawing a diagram to help visualize the relationships you expect to find among
variables, paying close attention to the causal ordering you might expect.
Recall that it is conceptually very possible for causes and effects to
reinforce one another over time, as in the case of a vicious circle.
2.Is this set of research questions and hypotheses better
answered by quantitative or qualitative methods? Why?

Thinking inductively, write several research questions and
hypotheses about how you think these variables will be related to one another:
1. Friends’ attitudes about drinking and stealing (V79 and
V77)
2. Respondent views on the consequences of delinquency

Should any requirements be imposed on researchers who seek
to study other cultures to ensure that procedures are appropriate and
interpretations are culturally sensitive? What practices would you suggest for
cross-cultural researchers to ensure that ethical guidelines are followed?
(Consider the wording of consent forms and the procedures for gaining voluntary
cooperation.)
SPSS or Excel  Exercises

Search the web for information on focus groups (previous,
upcoming, or ongoing) involving victims, offenders, fear of crime, crime
prevention, or another criminological topic. List the websites you found, and
write a paragraph about the purpose of each focus group and the sample
involved. How might these focus groups be used to influence public policy?

The April 1992 issue of the Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography is devoted to a series of essays reevaluating Whyte’s (1943)
classic field study, Street Corner Society. A social scientist interviewed some
of the people described in Whyte’s book and concluded that the researcher had
made methodological and ethical errors. Whyte and others offer rejoinders and
further commentary. Reading the entire issue of this journal will improve your
appreciation of the issues that field researchers confront.

Let’s take a look at the structure of the GSS survey first.
1. First, run frequencies for the variables race, educcat,
and polhitok.
2. Look carefully at the number of cases for each of these
measures. Why do you think the figure is so much smaller for one measure than
for the other two? Recall the discussion of the GSS in this chapter.

Big data begin as little data; that is, as the records of
phone calls, Twitter posts, or pictures taken by individuals in their daily
lives. What limitations should be imposed regarding access to and use of such
data once they have become aggregated into massive datasets? Is removing
explicit identifiers sufficient protection? When does access to big data
violate rights to privacy?

Conduct a preliminary pretest of the questionnaire by
conducting cognitive interviews with two students or other persons similar to
those to whom the survey is directed. Follow up the closed-ended questions with
open-ended probes that ask the students what they meant by each response or
what came to mind when they were asked each question. Take into account the
feedback you receive when you revise your questions.

Go to the Rutgers Center on Public Security
(http://www.rutgerscps.org/) and then go to the RTM menu. There you will find
several places to browse, including a “Topics” section that will direct you to
recent journal articles that have used RTM. Find a recent publication and
describe the methodology. What were the independent variables, and what was
used as the dependent variable? Are there any other variables that could have
been added to predict the dependent variable?
Ethics Exercises

Write 10 questions for a one-page questionnaire that
concerns your proposed research question. Your questions should operationalize
at least three of the variables on which you have focused, including at least
one independent and one dependent variable (you may have multiple questions to
measure some variables). Make all but one of your questions closed-ended. If
you completed the research proposal exercises in Chapter 4, you can select your
questions from the ones you developed for those exercises.