NCJ Number
88368
Journal
Revue de science criminelle et de droit penal compare Issue: 3 Dated: (July-September 1982) Pages: 565-588
Date Published
1982
Length
24 pages
Annotation
Seminar topics concerned the various methodologies and information sources by which analysts have sought to gain understanding of crime and criminality during the last decade. Discussion highlighted the merits and drawbacks of statistical and survey techniques and analyzed the import of their contributions to criminological knowledge.
Abstract
The first session dealt with the documentation of crime through historical records (criminal justice agency files, comprehensive period overviews) and statistical compilations. Caution was expressed regarding the data collection, interpretation, and significance of statistical analyses, which in recent years have elicited substantial criticism of their methodological validity. The session also classified the latest study methods as sociocriminological, including various types of surveys (victim, self-report, fear of crime) and as econocriminological, comprising crime cost analyses, correlations between economic indicators and crime, and cost-benefit estimates of operational alternatives in the criminal justice system. Enhancements yielded by these methodologies to the sum of criminological understanding were delineated in the second session. Among these were identification of crime-related factors, insights into unreported crime incidence, the relationship of risk and fear of crime, variations in crime patterns (geographical, seasonal), and the historical development of crime and the control apparatus. The variety of newly emerged methodologies represent choices of direction for further research which should produce increasingly refined techniques and significant results. Forty-seven footnotes are provided.