This is the CJBS 250-Research Methods & Statistics for Criminal Justice OER Resource Guide. The guide is intended for faculty teaching CJBS250 as a "Zero-Cost Textbook" course. This page features OER textbooks, zero cost library resources, government data sources, and interactive resources such as open source data visualization tools and course exercises.
OER Core Textbook
"Online Statistics: An Interactive Multimedia Course of Stud" is a resource for learning and teaching introductory statistics. It contains material presented in textbook format and as video presentations. This resource features interactive demonstrations and simulations, case studies, and an analysis lab.
Module 1: Research Inquiry
Elements of the Scientific Process
"There are six key steps that tend to characterize the scientific method. The first step is the question. This is the part where a scientist proposes the problem that he or she wants to solve. A well-conceived question usually leads to a hypothesis, a potential answer to the question at hand. Sometimes, hypotheses look more like predictions. The scientist predicts what the outcome will be when he or she tests the hypothesis. The scientist's test is also called the experiment. Experiments are ordered investigations that are intended to prove or disprove a hypothesis. Important data comes from performing an experiment."
How do we establish a cause-effect (causal) relationship? What criteria do we have to meet? Generally, there are three criteria that you must meet before you can say that you have evidence for a causal relationship. This website is from the "Web Center for Social Research Methods.
This website contains popular press articles reporting an array of research results. Its design supports teaching and learning, and example assignments call for students to evaluate whether the reported results are associated with experiments or with correlational studies.
Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise
This study compares how professional fact checkers, historians, and first year college students evaluated online information and presents the strategies fact checkers used to efficiently and effectively find trustworthy information. This work is licensed under Creative Commons. It may be used, as long as you give credit to the author.
Module 2: Literature Review
This is a document created by William Ashton, Ph.D., York College, CUNY
These OWL resources will help you learn how to use the American Psychological Association (APA) citation and format style. This section contains resources on in-text citation and the References page, as well as APA sample papers, slide presentations, and the APA classroom poster. The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out-of-class instruction.
Module 3: Building an Hypothesis
This ten chapter research methods text is written for both undergraduate and graduate students in education, psychology, and the social sciences. This chapter focuses on the hypothesis. It was obtained from the Internet.
This is from YouTube and is an excellent overview of variables.
Module 4: Research Ethics
Human Subjects Research (HSR) Training Courses
Click on the "Learner" box and then enter "City University of New York as the institution you are affiliated with. HSR provides foundational training in human subjects research and includes the historical development of human subject protections, ethical issues, and current regulatory and guidance information. Human Subjects Research (HSR) basic content is organized into two courses: Biomedical (Biomed) and Social-Behavioral-Educational (SBE). They are intended for anyone involved in research studies with human subjects, or who have responsibilities for setting policies and procedures with respect to such research, including Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). Additional modules of interest within HSR allow for exploration of several important topics and may be selected to meet organizational needs.
Module 5: Operationalization and Levels of Measurement
Operationalization is the process of strictly defining variables into measurable factors. The process defines fuzzy concepts and allows them to be measured, empirically and quantitatively. For experimental research, where interval or ratio measurements are used, the scales are usually well defined and strict. For many fields, such as social science, which often use ordinal measurements, operationalization is essential. It determines how the researchers are going to measure an emotion or concept, such as the level of distress or aggression. Such measurements are arbitrary, but allow others to replicate the research, as well as perform statistical analysis of the results.
The level of measurement refers to the relationship among the values that are assigned to the attributes for a variable. What does that mean? This was obtained from the website "Web Center for Social Research Methods."
According to the abstract this "article introduces a new indicator designed to measure the seriousness of recorded infractions. The measure is based on simple calculations and is easy to interpret."
The article highlights examples of data collection and measurement techniques as well as lessons drawn from innovative approaches to measurement.
Measuring the Distribution of Crime and Its Concentration
"Generally speaking, crime is, fortunately, a rare event. As far as modelling is concerned, this sparsity of data means that traditional measures to quantify concentration are not appropriate when applied to crime suffered by a population. Our objective is to develop a new technique to measure the concentration of crime which takes into account its low frequency of occurrence and its high degree of concentration in such a way that this measure is comparable over time and over different populations."
Module 6: Experimental Research Designs
The chapter introduces a new version of semantic analysis, which was applied to political psychology, marketing, advertising, ethnopsychology, and psychoendocrinology. Only the study of a political leader's image in student predispositions is included in this chapter as an example. The elaborated method estimates the following aspects of student ratings: Stable and noise-related semantic components, semantic coordinates and intensity and rigidity (stability), interpretations of a political image in relation to a predefined mentality, the degree of polarization, the degree of proximity of specific politicians to the ideal prototype of a political image for a given mentality.
Module 6a: Quasi-Experimental Designs
Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research by Campbell and Stanley
This book is still a classic, after over 50 years, for research design. Used for educational purposes under the Fair Use Provision. Found on the Internet at www.sfu.ca.
Ex-prisoners tend to be geographically concentrated in a relatively small number of neighborhoods within the most resource deprived sections of metropolitan areas. Furthermore, many prisoners return “home” to the same criminogenic environment with the same criminal opportunities and criminal peers that proved so detrimental prior to incarceration. Yet estimating the causal impact of place of residence on the likelihood of recidivism is complicated by the issue of selection bias. In this study, I use a natural experiment as a means of addressing the selection issue and examine whether the migration of ex-prisoners away from their former place of residence will lead to lower levels of recidivism. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Louisiana Gulf Coast, damaging many of the neighborhoods where ex-prisoners typically reside. The residential destruction resulting from Hurricane Katrina is an exogenous source of variation that influences where a parolee will reside upon release from prison. Findings reveal that moving away from former geographic areas substantially lowers a parolee's likelihood of re-incarceration.
Module 7: Descriptive Statistics
1. Define, construct, and interpret visual descriptions of data: frequency distribution, histogram, and frequency polygon.
2. Define, calculate, and interpret descriptive statistics concepts: mean, median, mode, range, and standard deviation.
Data Visualization Tools:
The following free tools can be used for projects in this learning module. Data visualization helps the reader see concepts more clearly and easily identify new patterns.With the right tools, students can sketch a convincing visual story from raw data. Here are some free and open-source tools for data visualization.
Datawrapper: No coding or design skills are necessary to use this mobile-friendly data visualization tool. You can create different types of visualizations (bar chart, split chart, etc.) in seconds.
Google Data Studio: Free and easy to set up if you have a Gmail account. You can connect it easily with Google products such as Google AdWords, Google Analytics, YouTube Analytics, and Google Sheets.
Open Heat Map: Turn your spreadsheet into an interactive map by uploading your CSV file or Google sheet.
Palladio: This tool is designed to visualize complex historical data. Features include a map view, graph view, and list view.
Module 8: Correlation Coefficients
Establishing Cause & Effect: Establishing a Cause-Effect Relationship ("Elements of Causation")
How do we establish a cause-effect (causal) relationship? What criteria do we have to meet? Generally, there are three criteria that you must meet before you can say that you have evidence for a causal relationship. This website is from the "Web Center for Social Research Methods.
“Service user Involvement in Risk Assessment and Management" by Daryl Kroner, 2012
"Drawing on self-prediction theory and the positive benefits of increasing health service user participation in risk assessments, the Transition Inventory (TI) was developed. It is an aid to the assessment of areas that people anticipate will be of difficulty in the next stage of transition, for example from open hospital to the community. Aims: The aim of this paper is to determine reliability and convergent/discriminant validity data for the TI and its subscales, including behavioral impulsivity, social pressure, substance misuse, financial/employment, leisure, negative affect, interpersonal and family concerns and social alienation."
Module 9: Qualitative Research
How to do Field Research with Victims
From "The Crime Report", July 29, 2015. This is a John Jay publication, accessible from the Internet. "Randomized control trials may be the gold standard for research, but field studies that include victims and police officers are delicate and “there are practical and ethical considerations that may exclude their use,”
Fieldwork has always been a cornerstone of American social science. It was the definitive approach for the first 40 years in its history for the study of social life. It was an intellectual break for “armchair” sociologists who were content with simply theorizing and offering little more than speculative reasoning for the many unparalleled social changes occurring at the time. In these early days, circa 1890 to 1940, fieldwork was both an intellectual movement and a methodological prescription for the sociological analysis of both the community and the individual, with an emphasis on developing a holistic understanding of related social processes. By applying basic anthropological principles, fieldwork in the United States was very much an applied sociological endeavor that has been integral to the evolution of criminology.
Doing ethnography or applying a qualitative technique?
Reflections from the ‘waiting field’. . . According to the abstract, "this article focuses on the importance of the ‘waiting field’; an opportunity to explore the times where real lives carry on before they make room for the intrusion of the data production of ‘the technique’ and remind us that much qualitative research is, in fact, an ethnographic undertaking: one that encompasses the researcher within and beyond the field."
The Great Interview: 25 Strategies for Studying People in Bed
This is a library resource, accessible using your John Jay login. "Based on interviews with a range of people about varied subjects, the author offers 25 directions that will, when followed in combination, point the interviewer along the road from the good (or not-so-good) interview to the great interview." From: "Qualitative Sociology", December 2002, Volume 25, Issue 4, pp 479–499
Qualitative Research Methods: A Data Collector's Field Guide
This how-to guide covers the mechanics of data collection for applied qualitative research appropriate for novice and experienced researchers. It's question and answer format and modular design make it easy for readers to find information on a particular topic quickly.
Module 10: Survey Research
Survey Research: Survey Research by: Joseph Check & Russell K. Schutt, 2012
How to Turn Survey Results Into Awesome Presentations: This is a PowerPoint presentation addressing how to do survey research.
Module 11: Probability and Sampling
MIT's Introduction to Probability and Statistics : This course provides an elementary introduction to probability and statistics. Topics include:
Basic combinatorics
Random variables
Probability distributions
Bayesian inference
Hypothesis testing
Course features include video lectures, course assignments with problem sets & solutions, lecture notes, and exams & solutions.
Module 12: Taxonomy of Statistics
Module 13: Two Population Means
Offender Perceptions on the Value of Employment by Terri-Lynne Scott
John Jay Faculty, Staff and students can access this article in a library database, using their John Jay login. Journal of Correctional Education, 1 March 2010, Vol.61(1), pp.46-67. "Given the histories of employment instability of the offenders entering correctional systems, enhancing an offender's vocational skills is an important need to address prior to their reintegration into the community. The purpose of the current research was to examine offender perceptions of the value of employment and crime, obtained as part of a larger, in depth study of factors affecting employment outcomes for Canadian offenders (Gillis & Andrews, 2005).
Module 14: Categorical Data
As higher numbers of individuals are released from prison and rejoin society, reentry programs can help former offenders reintegrate into society without continuing to engage in crime. This quasi-experimental study examined whether participation in reentry programming was associated with reduced recidivism among offenders who were no longer under criminal justice supervision.
Module 15: Three or More Means Populations
Punishment (PUN) and rehabilitation (REH) attitudes toward sex offenders/offenses (SO) and nonsexual offenders/offenses (NSO) were compared in a sample of 355 undergraduates, in response to brief vignettes depicting a sexual and nonsexual offense, conceptually matched for seriousness and severity.
This study explored the explanatory power of the interaction model between individual and contextual risk, in comparison to the additive model, to explain delinquency. This is a library resource, accessible using your John Jay login. Article was published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Pp 469-501.