Research methods

• Validity

  True / accurate
• Reliability

  Repeatable
• Quantitative

  Numbers
• Qualitative 


  Words
• Primary data

  By researcher
• Secondary data

  Already existing
• Practical issues

  Time, cost, access
• Ethical issues

  Confidentiality, informed consent, deception, protection from harm
• Theoretical issues

  P
• Official statistics

  Research by government departments and agencies on social issues
• Self report study

  Questionnaire completed by offenders
• British crime survey

  Victim study
• Dark figure of crime 


  Hidden / unreported figures of crime
• Weaknesses of self report study 


  Box

  • validity - exaggerated / downplay
  • representativeness - generally younger people
  • relevance -trivial crime reported
• Weaknesses of British crime surveys

  • rely on memory / recollection
  • Can be categorise wrong
  • Exclude white collar crime
• Strengths of official statistics

  • readily available
  • cheap
  • large sample
  • Completion rate high - law
  • regularly published
• weaknesses of official statistics

  • produced by others - not meet direct research needs
  • political bias can influence
• types of documents

  • public - by organisations (OFSTED)
  • personal - first person feelings (diary)
  • historical - past (newspaper)
  • Mass media documents - via social media
• benefits of secondary qualitative data

  • if no longer alive can still have data on
  • high validity
  • free to access and easily available
• Weaknesses of documents

  • authenticity - genuine
  • credibility - author sincerity
  • representativeness - time / place
  • meaning of data
• Strengths of documents

  • quick and readily available
  • require less active researching
  • usually valid and insightful
  • insight in history
• Questionnaire 


  Preset questions - ususlly self complete (eg. At home, online, workplace)
• Open questions 


  Not fixed answer - answer how they wish

  qualitative (indepth)
• Closed questions 


  Fixed responses (Eg. rank / Yes or No)

  Quantitative (short)
• Advantages of questionnaire

  • quick and cheap
  • easy to quantify (find correlation)
  • reliable - repeatable
  • objective - unbiased
  • large sample size helps make representative
• Disadvantages of questionnaires

  • low response rate - complex language / people don’t have time
  • inflexible - cannot change after published
  • only a ‘snapshot’
  • right answerism - give wanted answer
  • meaning can be confused
• Practical issues 


  Time, cost, ease, access, flexibility
• Ethical issues 


  Confidentiality, consent, deception, protection from harm
• Theoretical issues 


  Reliability, data type, generalisability, objective
• Triangulation 


  Using one positivism and one interpretivism
• Methodological pluralism 


  Use 1+ positivism or interpretivism