Study Document
Criminology Has Serious Limitations Research Paper
Pages:2 (432 words)
Sources:3
Subject:Crime
Topic:Criminology
Document Type:Research Paper
Document:#12036810
Criminology Research
Is Criminology a Hard Science?
Criminology is a discipline within the social sciences and as such is the study of people (Bhattacherjee, 2012). By comparison, researchers within the natural sciences focus primarily on physical phenomenon, such as the speed of radio waves through different materials or the impact of a drug on blood pressure. Since social science researchers, including criminologists, focus on the behavior of people as individuals and in groups there is inherently less certainty in the conclusions reached. For example, the change in temperature of a beaker of water when exposed to radio waves of a specific energy and frequency would be expected to be exactly the same under the same conditions. Any differences in temperatures would be attributed to either human error or some unnoticed change in the conditions; therefore, causal uncertainty would be an indicator of experimental error. By comparison, understanding the impact of implementing a broken windows policing policy in a high-crime neighborhood would depend on a number of factors, many of which might be unknown to the researchers. This implies that implementing the intervention in the same way in what seems to be identical neighborhoods might still produce different outcomes. The determination of causation in the social sciences is therefore fraught with uncertainty.
In support of this conclusion,…
Sample Source(s) Used
References
Bhattacherjee, A. (2012). Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, and Practices (2nd ed.). Retrieved from http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=oa_textbooks.
Sampson, R.J., Winship, C., & Knight, C. (2013). Translating causal claims: Principles and strategies for policy-relevant criminology. Criminology & Public Policy, 12(4), 587-616.
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