measuring crime

• OCS


  Official crime stats

  Recorded by the police and published by the home office each year. Useful for identifying trends and patterns in crime
• Strengths of OCS

  • P: cheap and easy to access for example online or in a library E: informed consent already given and normally anonymous T: reliable and very easy to repeat - positivists love them
• Weaknesses of OCS

  • P: not data available for specific area and doesn't explain why E: OCS can be influenced by political motives to remove attention from an issue T: lacks validity, doesn't explain human behaviour - Interpretivists dislike them
• Sociologists and OCS


  Functionalism - positivists, scientific and reliable, see police as representative of us all, New right/right realists - accept OCS Feminists - accept OCS that women commit less crime and want to find out why Marxists - tool used by bourgeoisie to control the w/c Interactionalists - OCS socially constructed and police label people
• Victim surveys


  A method of gathering crime data that directly surveys participants to determine their experiences as victims of crime.

  Uses unstructured interviews
• Strengths of Victim surveys

  • P: trends in certain crimes can be identified such as robberies
  • E: verstehen can be established with victim which can enhance validity T: collects qualitative data that is rich in detail. Positivists love them
• Weakness of Victim surveys

  • P: expensive to carry out, people may lie or forget causing low validity, low response rates leading to a lack of representativeness
  • E: may cause distress
  • T: qualitative data - hard to measure and no scientific, positivists dislike them
• Self-report studies


  Survey in which respondents are asked to report about criminal offenses they have committed. List they tick boxes of the crimes they've committed without being caught
• Strengths of self-report studies

  • P: longitudinal so can discover trends in certain crimes, cheap and lost of data can be gathered E: ppts are anonymous so more truthful
  • T: can gather quanititive data (positivists like)
• Weaknesses of self-report studies

  • P: questions may be misunderstood, social desirability bias, attrition, people may lie/ make false claims - affects validity not representative of all crimes (Marxists = ignore white collar) - better to use interview and build rapport E: questions may be of a personal nature which may make ppt's uncomfortable