SOC 2510 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Embezzlement, Data Element, Motor Vehicle Theft

• School: University of Manitoba
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 2510
• Professor: Linden

Document Summary

How can we obtain data about the amount and nature of crime in a society: methodologies: refers to the study or critique of methods. And do the statistics collected count what they purport to count (validity): reliability: identifies one of the standards against which the tools used to measure concepts are judged. Reliability refers to consistency of results over time: validity: the extent to which a tool or instrument (questionnaire, experiment) actually measures the concept the researcher claims to be interested in and not something else. Police gather vast amounts of information on suspects, incidents, arrests and charges: different police departments often use different rules for recording their information (doubts about the reliability of these statistics) Crime rates: criminologists calculate crime rates (or rates of incarceration, conviction, or recidivism) by dividing the amount of crime by the population size and multiplying by 100,000.