Course Description and Textbook Information

Course Description

Content

This course will teach students how to actually conduct research in the criminal justice field. Students will learn about traditional social science methods used in our discipline and how to apply them to their own research. We will cover various research designs, sampling issues, ethical considerations, survey construction, interviewing, and basic functions with a computer software package, excel, that are typically used in analyzing social science data.

In this class, students will complete several research projects that build on each other. These research projects introduce students to the various research techniques used in our field by having them actually conduct the research. These projects are designed to increase in difficulty and to allow the student to apply the knowledge learned in this class as they progress.

In the course of these projects, students will: assess ethical issues in research, create a survey instrument, decide on and assess a sampling technique, analyze survey and other criminological data using descriptive analysis and inferential statistics, conduct a field observation study, develop hypotheses and present the justification for these hypotheses, select and transform variables, test hypotheses using criminological data, perform appropriate statistical tests, and develop conclusions and implications based on their research.