POLI 100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Relative Risk, Qualitative Property, Restorative Justice
Document Summary
Chapter 3 measuring crime and criminal behaviour. Criminologists use crime data to conduct research that can be used to inform public policy: crime data is information collected to measure the frequency and severity of criminal events. It is essential that data collection is valid, reliable and appropriate. Five key purposes of criminological data: description the first step toward understanding, explaining and ultimately predicting crime and criminality is the ability to describe criminal phenomena accurately, explanation criminological theories explain crime patterns and trends. Theories enable researches to make testable predictions based on empirical data. Researchers rely on quantifiable data to test their theoretical hypotheses: evaluation the criminal justice system is expensive to operate, and financial accountability has become a major issue among policy-makers and their constituents. To assess what we are getting for our money and how well it works, we need accurate data: risk assessment while crime may appear to be everywhere, we know that this is not true.
