patterns in crime

• Self report studies


  Confidential questionnaires or interviews asking the respondent whether they have committed any specific criminal acts. Unknown to the police
• A question to test your knowledge from last lesson: Give one strength and one limitation of using open questions in a questionnaire
• A random question to test your knowledge: Why are the ethical guidelines important?
• Analysing

  1. Official statistics- official figures that are published by government and charities

  2. Police counts- number of offences

  3. Court records- number of convictions and the characteristics of the offender

  4. Home office statistics- published each year- compiled from all the police forces

  5. Many crimes don’t appear in these statistics

  6. Unreported and unrecorded crimes are known as the dark figures

  7. Many sociologists see police statistics as socially constructed. Interpretivists argue that they tell us about the decisions made by those who compile the statistics rather than the extent of the criminal activity

  8. There are two main techniques that sociologists use in order to get a better picture of crime: Self report studies

  9. Victimisation studies (or Victim surveys)
• Patterns of Crime

  1. To know how we can analyse the patterns of crime

  2. To research some official statistics from England and analyse what they show

  3. To know the strengths and limitations of official statistics to analyse crimes
• Thinking back to Theory and Methods

  1. What are official statistics?

  2. How might these be used to get information about crime?
• A question to test your knowledge from the previous topic: Explain how we could increase both the reliability and the validity of questionnaires
• Confidential questionnaires or interviews asking the respondent whether they have committed any specific criminal acts. Unknown to the police
• Relevance of the method: Most self-report studies ask about trivial offences, so some see this more as a test for honesty rather than criminality
• Connection finding: The ability to use connections from past experiences to seek possible generalizations
• Official statistics of crimes may be seen as a social construction
• The ability to use some skills with such ease as they no longer require active thinking
• Importance of Victim Surveys: Respondents may be more willing to report crimes they have been victims of rather than those they have committed themselves. They can also uncover patterns in unreported crimes
• Validity of the method: How accurate are the responses?
• Limitation of Victim Surveys: They don't cover all types of crime, such as victimless crimes or crimes against children
• Victim Surveys refer to asking a sample of people what crimes they have been victims of
• Dark figures are unreported or undiscovered crimes
• Representativeness of the method: Categories like white-collar crimes are ignored, and these methods are focused on adolescent crimes
• Problem with the statistics from the government website
• Importance of the method: It may shed light on middle-class women committing crimes, as official statistics usually show male, working-class criminals
• Validity of Victim Surveys: They rely on the memory of the respondent
• Statistics from the Office of National Statistics website (2023) surprise you