A Criminologist's Guide to R: Crime by the Numbers introduces the programming language R and covers the necessary skills to conduct quantitative research in criminology. By the end of this book, a person without any prior programming experience can take raw crime data, be able to clean it, visualize the data, present it using R Markdown, and change it to a format ready for analysis. A Criminologist's Guide to R focuses on skills specifically for criminology such as spatial joins, mapping, and scraping data from PDFs, however any social scientist looking for an introduction to R for data analysis will find this useful. Key Features: Introduction to RStudio including how to change user preference settings. Basic data exploration and cleaning – subsetting, loading data, regular expressions, aggregating data. Graphing with ggplot2. How to make maps (hotspot maps, choropleth maps, interactive maps). Webscraping and PDF scraping. Project management – how to prepare for a project, how to decide which projects to do, best ways to collaborate with people, how to store your code (using git), and how to test your code.
This book provides hands-on guidance for researchers and practitioners in criminal justice and criminology to perform statistical analyses and data visualization in the free and open-source software R. It offers a step-by-step guide for beginners to become familiar with the RStudio platform and tidyverse set of packages. This volume will help users master the fundamentals of the R programming language, providing tutorials in each chapter that lay out research questions and hypotheses centering around a real criminal justice dataset, such as data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, National Crime Victimization Survey, Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, The Monitoring the Future Study, and The National Youth Survey. Users will also learn how to manipulate common sources of agency data, such as calls-for-service (CFS) data. The end of each chapter includes exercises that reinforce the R tutorial examples, designed to help master the software as well as to provide practice on statistical concepts, data analysis, and interpretation of results. The text can be used as a stand-alone guide to learning R or it can be used as a companion guide to an introductory statistics textbook, such as Basic Statistics in Criminal Justice (2020).
"This book introduces the programming language R and covers the necessary skills to conduct quantitative research in criminology. While it can apply to other social science research, it does focus on skills specifically for criminology such as spatial joins, mapping, and scraping data from PDFs. The goal of this book is that by the end, a person without any prior programming experience can take raw crime data (e.g. from a .rds file, an Excel file, a PDF, from a website), be able to clean it, visualize the data, present it using R Markdown, and change it to a format ready for analysis (e.g. subset and aggregate the data)"--
This book provides hands-on guidance for researchers and practitioners in criminal justice and criminology to perform statistical analyses and data visualization in the free and open-source software, R. It offers a step-by-step guide for beginners to become familiar with the RStudio platform. This volume will help users master the fundamentals of the R programming language, in addition to program basics. Tutorials in each chapter lay out research questions and hypotheses that center around a real criminal justice dataset, such as data from the National Youth Survey, Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS)-Body Worn Camera Survey, the Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities (SISFCF), the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the British Crime Survey/Crime Survey for England and Wales, and the Seattle Neighborhoods and Crime Survey. At the end of each chapter are exercises that reinforce the R tutorial examples, designed to help master the software, as well as to provide practice on statistical concepts, data analysis, and interpretation of results. The text can be used as a stand-alone guide to learning R or it can be used as a companion guide to an introductory statistics textbook, such as Basic Statistics in Criminal Justice (2020).
Criminological Skills and Research for Beginners is a comprehensive and engaging guide to research methods in Criminology, and the skills required for academic success. Written specifically for undergraduate students and novice researchers, this book has been designed as a lively and accessible guide to planning, conducting and reporting research in the subject. It emphasises practical skills required in studying Criminology, the importance of criminological research, and places related methodology firmly in the context of students’ broader study of the discipline, before moving on to provide a detailed guide to the actual processes of research. It is common for Criminology undergraduates to feel intimidated at the prospect of conducting their own research, and these students typically struggle to see the relevance of research methods to their own studies. This book speaks directly to the needs of such students, and includes contemporary examples and case studies that bring a topic that is often thought of as dry to life, providing a thorough and accessible practical guide that students can return to at each stage of their research, all the way through to their dissertation. This book covers: an examination of the theoretical, political and ethical debates in criminological research; a complete guide to planning criminological research, assisting student researchers in identifying their research questions, choosing their research methods and critiquing the available literature; guidance on the practicalities and processes of collecting data; a discussion of the process of analysing data and writing up research. New to the second edition is a brand new section on research skills in Criminology, including detailed coverage of writing skills, referencing, dissertations and research reports, presentation skills and revision. The book also offers additional coverage of the politics of criminological research and the presentation of official crime statistics. Including an extensive glossary and an integrated companion website with extra examples, exercises and videos to further develop students’ understanding, this book is essential reading for any undergraduate on a Criminological Research Methods or Research Skills course, or for anyone in need of practical guidance on any or all of the various stages involved in conducting thorough and effective criminological research.
Criminological Research for Beginners is a comprehensive and engaging guide to research methods in Criminology. Written specifically for undergraduate students and novice researchers, this book has been designed as a practical guide to planning, conducting, and reporting research in the subject. By first inviting readers to consider the importance of criminological research, the book places related methodology firmly in the context of students’ broader study of Criminology, before moving on to provide a detailed guide to the practical processes of research. It is common for Criminology undergraduates to feel intimidated at the prospect of conducting their own research, and these students typically struggle to see the relevance of research methods to their own studies. This book speaks directly to the needs of such students, and includes contemporary examples and case studies that bring a topic that is often thought of as dry to life, providing a thorough and accessible practical guide that students can return to at each stage of their research, all the way through to their dissertation. This book covers: an examination of the theoretical, political, and ethical debates in criminological research; a complete guide to planning criminological research, assisting student researchers in identifying their research questions, choosing their research methods, and critiquing the available literature; guidance on the practicalities and processes of collecting data, a discussion of the process of analysing data and writing up research, Including an extensive glossary and an integrated companion website with extra examples, exercises, and videos to further develop students’ understanding, this book is essential reading for any undergraduate on a Criminological Research Methods course, or for anyone in need of practical guidance on any or every of the various stages involved in conducting thorough and effective criminological research.
Quantitative criminology has certainly come a long way since I was ?rst introduced to a largely qualitative criminology some 40 years ago, when I was recruited to lead a task force on science and technology for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. At that time, criminology was a very limited activity, depending almost exclusively on the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) initiated by the FBI in 1929 for measurement of crime based on victim reports to the police and on police arrests. A ty- cal mode of analysis was simple bivariate correlation. Marvin Wolfgang and colleagues were makingan importantadvancebytrackinglongitudinaldata onarrestsin Philadelphia,an in- vation that was widely appreciated. And the ?eld was very small: I remember attending my ?rst meeting of the American Society of Criminology in about 1968 in an anteroom at New York University; there were about 25–30 people in attendance, mostly sociologists with a few lawyers thrown in. That Society today has over 3,000 members, mostly now drawn from criminology which has established its own clear identity, but augmented by a wide variety of disciplines that include statisticians, economists, demographers, and even a few engineers. This Handbook provides a remarkable testimony to the growth of that ?eld. Following the maxim that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t understand it,” we have seen the early dissatisfaction with the UCR replaced by a wide variety of new approaches to measuring crime victimization and offending.
Criminological research lies at the heart of criminological theory, influences social policy development, as well as informs criminal justice practice. The ability to collect, analyse and present empirical data is a core skill every student of criminology must learn. Written as an engaging step-by-step guide and illustrated by detailed case studies, this book guides the reader in how to analyse criminological data. Key features of the book include: o Guidance on how to identify a research topic, designing a research study, accounting for the role of the researcher and writing up and presenting research findings. o A thorough account of the development of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and data analysis within the field of criminology. o Relevant and up-to-date case studies, drawn from internationally published criminological research sources. o Clear and accessible chapter content supported by helpful introductions, concise summaries, self-study questions and suggestions for further reading. Understanding Criminological Research: A Guide to Data Analysis in invaluable reading for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in criminology and criminal justice.
"Statistical Analysis in Criminal Justice and Criminology" is aimed at undergraduates with little or no background in the subject. It is premised on active learning utilizing common statistical tools to analyze criminal justice data. The focus is on the student's understanding of fundamental statistical "analysis," and not on comprehensive coverage of statistical research. Special features of the book include: examples of criminal justice research step-by-step guidance in using SPSS two data sets: a) crime data from the Uniform Crime Reports for all 50 states, coupled with other data, such as number of executions, size of the jail and prison population; and b) survey data from the National Survey on Crime and Justice. Companion Website, an instructor's manual, and a student study guide introduction of a new method of analysis in each chapter, along with terms, examples, and practice problems.
This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of criminology find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In criminology, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Criminology, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study and practice of criminology. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.
