Criminological Scholarship and Race: A Response to Professors Ross and Edwards

• NCJ Number: 183363
• Journal: Journal of Criminal Justice Volume: 28 Issue: 3 Dated: May/June 2000 Pages: 245-249
• Author(s): J. Mitchell Miller
• Date Published: 2000
• Length: 5 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

A recent article in this journal by Ross and Edwards (1998) argued that the criminological scholarship of minority criminologists has been devalued through exclusionary practices in the academic field of criminal justice; in the current study, the Ross and Edwards method was replicated with a different study population to illustrate problems with the design of the Ross and Edwards study.

Abstract

Based on a survey of African-American criminologists in higher education, the Ross and Edwards article purported to profile this designated group of minority academicians, address practices of professional inclusions and exclusions specific to them, examine their publication experiences, and examine teaching and research preferences. By administering the most salient items from the same questionnaire to a matched sample of non-African American criminologists, the presence of a racial bias in American criminological scholarship was explored. The findings suggest consideration of other than an "exclusionary" theory for different race-specific publication experiences. The Ross and Edwards research design has several problems. First, it is conceptually flawed. It obtained data on the perception of African-American faculty of the editorial responses from peer-reviewed journals. There is no reason to believe that the perceptions of authors are accurate measures of the editorial decision making process. Absent some proof of the validity of the measure, inferences about biases in the editorial process cannot be scientifically drawn. Second, their sample was small and unlikely to be representative. Third, the Ross and Edwards interpretation of responses to the survey is questionable. Fourth, there was a lack of meaningful scrutiny. Based on the scant information available, first from the Ross and Edwards study and then from the current matched questionnaire, this article concludes that the majority of all scholars, regardless of race and ethnicity, are undecided as to the response their work receives, a natural response to an issue that involves psychological and perhaps emotional investment. 4 tables and 6 references