Criminal Justice Analysis - Problem Specification, Module 1

• NCJ Number: 81173
• Author(s): S Hirshorn
• Date Published: Unknown
• Length: 0 pages
• Grant Number(s): 78-MU-AX-0030
• Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Justice
• Publication Format: Film
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: *This document is currently unavailable from NCJRS. 3 videotapes, total running time 2 hours and 10 minutes, color, 1 inch. Part of the Criminal Justice Analysis Course held at Washburn University of Topeka.

Annotation

This videotaped working classroom session, part of a course on criminal justice analysis, is devoted to problem specification as a process in itself, preliminary to and independent of problem analysis.

Abstract

Deemed the central and perhaps most difficult aspect of criminal justice analysis, problem specification requires systematic conceptualizing and hypothesizing to formulate a comprehensive and persuasive problem statement for decisionmakers. Problem specification consists of the identification of concerns, the elaboration of concepts, variables and measures, and the postulating of hypotheses. It requires the analyst to adopt a reactive and problem-seeking style in response to general public concerns. The subsequent process is one of increasing specificity in defining problem components, translating vague concerns into identifiable concepts with characteristic variables, and finding precise qualitative or quantitative measures of these. For instance, a concern over crime can be conceptualized as incidence of crime; broken down into the variables of incidence of occurrence, place, and crime types; and measured for frequency by type and rate for type based on population or population-at-risk. Postulation of hypotheses which assert a relationship between either concepts, variables, or measures is an important final step because such hypotheses help establish boundaries of a problem and may suggest potential problem-solving strategies. Hypotheses, either causal or descriptive, are tools used by analysts to organize data and make explicit the nature of the problem being considered. Analysts must determine whether the concepts and related variables covered by the hypothesis can be measured and will be supported by the data. There is a basic logic to problem specification. The process restricts the subject matter of a general concern to a few specific measures and this ultimately produces the problem statement -- the final product of analysis incorporating conclusions and recommendations. The method of approaching a problem from concerns rather than data enables the analyst to deal with the body of data selectively and to arrive at strategies that relate specifically to the hypotheses formulated. Problem specification exercises concern crime trends and auto theft. For the instructor's guide to this course, see NCJ 81170. For other videotaped sessions, see NCJ 81171-2, 81174-82, and 81186.