What is a “snowball”? For some, a snowball is a drink made of advocaat and lemonade; for others, a mix of heroin and cocaine injected; for yet others, a handful of packed snow commonly thrown at objects or people; for gamblers, it refers to a cash prize that accumulates over successive games; for social scientists, it is a form of sampling. There are other uses for the term in the stock market and further historical usages that refer to stealing things from washing lines or that are racist. Clearly then, different people in different contexts and different times will have used the term “snowball” to refer to various activities or processes. Problems like this—whereby a particular word or phrase may have various meanings or may be interpreted variously—are just one of the issues for which cognitive interviews can offer insights (and possible solutions).
Cognitive interviews can also help researchers designing surveys to identify problems with mistranslation of words, or near-translations that do not quite convey the intended meaning. They are also useful for ensuring that terms are understood in the same way by all sections of society, and that they can be used to assess the degree to which organizational structures are similar in different countries (not all jurisdictions have traffic police, for example). They can also assess conceptual equivalence. Among the issues explored here are the following:
• What cognitive interviews are
• The background to their development
• Why they might be used in cross-national crime and victimization surveys
• Some of the challenges associated with cross-national surveys
• Ways cognitive interviews can help with these challenges
• Different approaches to cognitive interviewing (and the advantages of each)
• How to undertake cognitive interviews
• A “real-world” example of a cognitive interviewing exercise
• Whether different probing styles make any difference to the quality of the data derived.
Article
Using Cognitive Interviews to Guide Questionnaire Construction for Cross-National Crime Surveys
Stephen Farrall
Article
Evidence-Based Policing
Renée J. Mitchell
Evidence-based policing (EBP) by its original definition is “the use of the best available research on the outcomes of police work to implement guidelines and evaluate agencies, units, and officers.” Since then, the definition of EBP has been evolving, with academics adjusting the definition to better fit how police and researchers apply research in the field. EBP is best described as an approach to law enforcement and public safety. It involves the application of empirical research, scientific methods, and data-driven decision-making to policing practices, strategies, and policies. The term “evidence-based” is borrowed from the field of medicine and has been adapted to various disciplines, including education, social work, and, in this case, policing.
An EBP approach emphasizes the following:
1. Use of research and data: Implementing strategies and practices shown to be effective through rigorous research.
2. Evaluation and adaptation: Continuously assessing the effectiveness of policing methods and making adjustments based on empirical evidence.
3. Scientific methodology: Applying the principles of scientific inquiry to test the effectiveness of different policing strategies.
EBP is a practical approach that integrates scientific research into police work to improve outcomes, decision-making, and policy development in law enforcement. This approach has slowly begun to create a shift in both academics’ and practitioners’ points of view. When a paradigm shift occurs in a scientific discipline, there is always a period before the shift occurs where the definitions and parameters of the discipline are ambiguous. A paradigm shift refers to a fundamental change in the underlying assumptions or dominant methodologies within a given scientific discipline or more broadly in any intellectual field or approach. This concept was popularized by philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Paradigm shifts can initially face resistance until the new paradigm becomes widely accepted and mainstream.
In essence, a paradigm shift is not just a small modification or improvement, but a complete overhaul of the foundational principles and methods in a particular field, leading to a new way of thinking and understanding. As EBP developed from evidence-based medicine, it has followed the same developmental trajectory of changes in definition and application, resistance to adoption, advocates and critics of the approach, and the development of societies to assist with incorporation of practices by police departments. EBP is different from other disciplines such as criminology or crime science, as the core of EBP is to use rigorous research methodologies to test policing practices in the field. The reason for this approach is to determine whether policing practices “work” under real-life circumstances rather than just theoretically. Additionally, EBP advocates argue that rigorous testing is a better approach to serving the public than having officers use anecdotes to drive practices. EBP is an approach that not all academics or practitioners agree with, but it is one way of determining the causal effects of a policing practice.
Article
Methodological Approaches to Studying Crime and Popular Culture in New Media
Francine Banner
Researchers across varied disciplines have begun to explore social media as a new delta of communication; however, few are taking a hard look at social media as it relates to crime. Sites such as Twitter and Facebook increasingly are being used by law enforcement as tools for engaging in criminal investigation, improving public relations, and increasing public awareness. Similarly, persons engaging in crime increasingly employ such sites in novel and unique ways to network, exchange information, and execute and record criminal activities. A survey of research in fields ranging from computer science to sociology to communications demonstrates that both quantitative and qualitative research on and about social media have the capacity greatly to advance contemporary understanding of social organization and protest, crime and criminal behavior, and law and social control. For example, Facebook and Twitter have become key sources for gaining insights into criminal behaviors, such as gang activity, as well as on-the-ground data regarding significant events, such as the Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, the Black Lives matter movements, and elections of public figures. Other applications, such as Snapchat and Kik, provide the opportunity for immediate transmission of content and a new source of evidence to be used in criminal prosecutions. Studying social media from a criminal justice perspective, however, is a complex endeavor. While the Internet offers seemingly limitless opportunities for social organizing and networked engagement, the forum bears as much capacity for exclusion as it does for liberation. The growth of new social ills or crimes, such as “doxing,” “phishing,” and “revenge pornography,” for example, highlight that the confluence of immediacy of communication, perceived anonymity, and lack of moderation often renders the online environment threatening for perceived outsiders, particularly young women. On the other hand, as incidents, such as online threats against gamer Zoe Quinn and blogger Anita Sarkeesian, have come to light, online content is increasingly monitored, regulated, and controlled by its corporate ownership, who generally reveal little about how information is sorted, prioritized, and disseminated. As a researcher, one must be mindful that data, particularly qualitative data, collected from social media sites may not be random, representative, or generalizable. In addition, attendant to studying the Internet are unique ethical and privacy concerns not present in non-virtual fora. Many describe the Internet as a public sphere, and law enforcement often treats the online environment as a location in which Fourth Amendment privacy protections can be less rigorously observed. For researchers, however, it is essential to carefully consider whether the study of online discourse is archival or is human subjects research, and in the case of the latter, whether and how consent might be obtained. It is also important that researchers are attentive to the particular characteristics of the online site or sites they choose to examine, as the mission, rules, and practices of each site vary dramatically.
Article
Life Events Calendar Method
Jennifer Roberts
The calendar methodology facilitates data collection across multiple life domains, events, and time to assess how dynamic changes influence criminal offending, victimization, and criminal justice contacts. Building upon knowledge of the structure of autobiographical memory, calendar methodologists use a variety of cues to aid recall of transitions into and out of a variety of life events during a specified time frame. Past studies have created highly specialized calendars for data collection, altering the life domains and events studied, type of calendar used (paper or calendar), time unit and reference period, and mode of administration. Overall, the calendar method performs similar to or better than a standard interviewing or survey procedure. However, more studies using criminological samples and topics are needed.
Article
Offenders of Environmental Crimes
Rita Faria
Criminology was born from the political and scientific project of producing evidence-based knowledge about a particular kind of subject: the criminal. This evasive topic of inquiry has driven orthodox and positivistic criminology to look for risk factors, situational clues, criminal scripts, opportunities for crime, and so on. But critiques of such approach have noted how the framework of criminal action and motivation—that is: crime—ought to be analyzed from a social constructionist perspective rather than by mere reified, legal notions. In green criminology scholarship, environmental harms and crimes have been critically debated, and it is fairly accepted that, while necessary, legalistic approaches to environmental offenses would not suffice due to their ethnocentric perspective of life, social order, and justice. However, in green criminology, evidence-based and critical debates about the environmental offender are somehow lagging. There has been a growth of research devoted to understanding environmental offending and ways to react to it, and more data about offenders is being collected, with authors now in a better position to inform about the features of those who commit environmental offenses and harms. However, a closer look at the bulk of literature reveals that green criminology has been looking at a hard-to-grasp reality, composed of a multitude of actors (and respective actions) that include individual offenders, as well as criminal networks, and legitimate organizations such as corporations and states—all of which should be envisioned as complex systems that interact with particular surroundings and contexts, moved by specific values and (sub)cultural norms.
Trying to convey this multitude into one article is not an easy job and, overall, the complexity of environmental offenses reveals the multifaceted nature of offenders and the multilayered causes and motives of behaviors that harm the environment or break those laws and regulations dedicated to protecting nonhuman species, habitats, or the environment as a whole.
Article
Qualitative Interviewing
John J. Brent, Peter B. Kraska, and Justin Hutchens
Given the multifaceted and interdisciplinary nature of studying crime and criminal justice, the pursuit of credible, reliable, and rigorous knowledge requires a well-developed methodological infrastructure. To explore and examine these areas, there are times when research needs to document probabilities, examine rates, identify correlations, and test theoretical propositions. There are also times when research needs to explore the more qualitative elements, namely the perspectives, interpretations, lived experiences, and constructed realities. Among the more prominent qualitative methods within the field’s methodological toolbox are interviews. Aiding other approaches, qualitative interviews contribute to the field’s methodological means by first offering a more inductive and interpretive framework to study crime-related phenomena. From these foundations, they are replete with avenues through which to conceptualize, construct, and administer research efforts. They also provide a host of unique and beneficial methodological means to collect, code, and analyze collected data. When their overall impact is examined, the continued use and development of qualitative methods—more specifically, interviews—can progress the field’s body of knowledge while contributing to more informed practices and policies. Given their use and utility, interviews have become some of the most used methodological approaches within the social sciences.
Article
Qualitative Methods in International and Comparative Criminology
Max Travers
Although the field of international criminology has mostly employed quantitative methods to test universal theories, there is a growing recognition of the potential value of qualitative methods in understanding crime and criminal justice in a globalizing world. The difficulties in developing this field are partly practical and financial. It is difficult visiting different countries and overcoming language barriers. But there are also conceptual challenges. Criminology generally is only just starting to understand and engage with the distinction between quantitative and qualitative research methods and to discover the wide range of qualitative methods employed in interdisciplinary fields, such as education, health, environmental, media, and management studies, and to recognize that theories are important in this field.