CRM 1300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Police Brutality, Victimless Crime, Victimology
31 Oct 2016
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Counting crime 1: the truth, the media and the popular imagination. Theory and policy require statistics about the decisions of those who break the law; about the decisions of those who maintain it; and about what people think of all this. In criminology, you are usually one or the other. It is important we do not lose qualitative idea that people interpret things differently. Science has solved, but also introduced many problems. We do not have as much faith in science anymore. Validity: the extent to which a tool or instrument actually measures the concept a researcher claims to be interested in. Crime rate = amount of crime / population size x 100,000 = standard rate by 100,000. If you want good empirical measure, it has to be reliable. If you use the same measure on everyone, the results will be predictable. Validity to be a good measure of something.
