My notes for Changing Awareness of Crime AC 1.6 - evaluate methods of collecting statistics about crime. In the controlled assessment, I achieved 96/100 (100/100 UMS marks).
evaluate methods of collecting statistics about crime
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Criminology
Changing Awareness of Crime
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Evaluate Methods of Collecting Statistics about Crime
Purposes of crime statistics
Find out causes of crime.
Assess if policies are effective.
Find out about/profile offenders and victims.
Spot patterns and trends.
Deal with the crimes as a society.
Police prioritisation.
Frequency of crime.
Key evaluation criteria for methods
Reliability
Reliable data is data that has been collected in a consistent way. Someone else doing the
same research would get the same/similar result.
A general survey on crime carried out the day after a terrorist attack would be unreliable
because people would have a skewed view of the level of crime.
Validity
Validity is how true to life the data is.
‘How fearful do you feel when walking alone at night?’ is not a valid measure of women’s
fears of sexual assault because a woman could be fearful of other crimes taking place at that
time, and sexual assault does not only happen at night.
Ethics
Ethics consider whether the research is moral or right.
Examples of ethical issues to consider when evaluating research methods are informed
consent, anonymity, protection from harm, the right to withdraw, confidentiality, deception
and privacy.
Sources of crime statistics
Police crime statistics
They are gathered by the Home Office. Everything the police does is regarded.
It takes data from own observations and investigations and uses the reported crime from
victims and the public.
There are 43 regional police forces that produce reports each month about the number of
crimes recorded in their area. They include all notifiable offences.
One key limitation of these statistics is that they do not explain unreported and unrecorded
crime.
Reliability
o Repeatable and structured.
o Generally thought of as reliable on different offences, police forces should follow the
same procedures and definitions.
o There are sometimes errors recording details.
Validity
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