The Practice of Research in Criminology and Criminal Justice

Ronet D. Bachman, PhD, worked as a statistician at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, before going back to an academic career; she is now a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. She is coauthor of Statistical Methods for Criminology and Criminal Justice and coeditor of Explaining Criminals and Crime: Essays in Contemporary Criminal Theory. In addition, she is the author of Death and Violence on the Reservation and coauthor of Stress, Culture, and Aggression; Murder American Style; and Violence: The Enduring Problem, along with numerous articles and papers that examine the epidemiology and etiology of violence, with particular emphasis on women, the elderly, and minority populations as well as research examining desistance from crime. Her most recent federally funded research was a mixed-methods study that examined the long-term desistance trajectories of criminal justice involved drug-involved individuals who have been followed with both quantitative and interview data for nearly thirty years. Her current state-funded research is assessing the needs of violent crime victims, especially those whose voices are rarely heard such as loved ones of homicide victims.   Russell K. Schutt, PhD, is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he received the 2007 Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Service and taught from 1979 to 2022. He is also a Clinical Research Scientist I at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a Lecturer (part-time) in the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. He completed his BA, MA, and PhD degrees at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology of Social Control Training Program at Yale University (where he met Dan). In addition to ten editions of Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research and one of Understanding the Social World, as well as coauthored versions for the fields of social work, criminal justice, psychology, and education, his other books include Homelessness, Housing, and Mental Illness (2011), Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society (coedited, 2015), and Organization in a Changing Environment (1986). He has authored and coauthored more than 65 peer reviewed journal articles, as well as book chapters and research reports on homelessness, mental health, organizations, law, and teaching research methods. His currently a Dual Principal Investigator (with Matcheri Keshavan, MD) in randomized comparative effectiveness trial of two socially-oriented interventions to improve community functioning among persons diagnosed with serious mental illness, funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). His other recently concluded research includes co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded study of the social impact of the pandemic in Boston, and co-investigator on a Veterans Health Administration-funded study of peer support.  His earlier research has been funded by the National Cancer Institute, the Veterans Health Administration, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Fetzer Institute, and state agencies. Details are available at https://blogs.umb.edu/russellkschutt/.

Chapter 1: Science, Society, and Research
Chapter 2: The Process and Problems of Research
Chapter 3: Ethical Guidelines for Research
Chapter 4: Conceptualization and Measurement
Chapter 5: Sampling
Chapter 6: Causation and Research Design
Chapter 7: Experimental Designs
Chapter 8: Survey Research
Chapter 9: Qualitative Methods: Observing, Participating, and Listening
Chapter 10: Analyzing Content: Research Using Secondary, Historical, and Comparative Data, Content Analysis, and Visual Criminology
Chapter 11: Social Network Analysis Crime Mapping, and Big Data
Chapter 12: Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Chapter 13: Mixing and Comparing Methods
Chapter 14: Analyzing Quantitative Data
Chapter 15: Analyzing Qualitative Data
Chapter 16: Summarizing and Reporting Research