LS227 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Juvenile Delinquency, Critical Race Theory, Sentenced
19 Jun 2016
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Document Summary
Empirical reality of crime- systematic collection of observable data. They don"t just collect facts though, they understand criminal events, try to explain why, try to prevent. Reliability- refers to consistency of results over time. Replication: someone can perform your same study and get the same results. Validity: a measure is valid if it actually measures what you want it to measure. Becomes important when we test theories of crime. Comparing raw numbers makes it difficult to make comparisons because populations are different. Not every criminal incident is treated the same way so not all of them are in crime data. Not always aware of every crime that takes place. All crimes but not all criminals treated equally. Administrative records are individual cases and deal with one person at a time. Unit of count changes based on particular project becomes important how we bind these records aggregating data- not comparable. Dark figure of crime is undetected and unreported.
