Communicating the excitement and importance of criminal justice research, this practical and comprehensive book shows students how to perform and understand statistical analyses, while helping them recognize the connection between statistical analyses used in everyday life and their importance to criminology and criminal justice. This updated Fifth Edition is packed with real-world case studies and contemporary examples utilizing the most current crime data and empirical research available. Each chapter presents a particular statistical method in the context of a substantive research story.
Ronet D. Bachman, PhD, worked as a statistician at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, before going back to an academic career; she is now a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. She is coauthor of Statistical Methods for Criminology and Criminal Justice and coeditor of Explaining Criminals and Crime: Essays in Contemporary Criminal Theory. In addition, she is the author of Death and Violence on the Reservation and coauthor of Stress, Culture, and Aggression; Murder American Style; and Violence: The Enduring Problem, along with numerous articles and papers that examine the epidemiology and etiology of violence, with particular emphasis on women, the elderly, and minority populations as well as research examining desistance from crime. Her most recent federally funded research was a mixed-methods study that examined the long-term desistance trajectories of criminal justice involved drug-involved individuals who have been followed with both quantitative and interview data for nearly thirty years. Her current state-funded research is assessing the needs of violent crime victims, especially those whose voices are rarely heard such as loved ones of homicide victims. Raymond Paternoster, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. He received his B.A. in sociology at the University of Delaware where he was introduced to criminology by Frank Scarpitti and obtained his Ph.D. at Florida State University under the careful and dedicated tutelage of Gordon Waldo and Ted Chiricos. He is coauthor of The Death Penalty: America's Experience with Capital Punishment. In addition to his interest in statistics, he also pursues questions related to offender decision making and rational choice theory, desistance from crime, and capital punishment. With funding from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), he is currently working on research comparing the decision-making patterns and characteristics of a sample of serious adult offenders and a comparable group of community members.
Chapter 1. The Importance of Statistics in the Criminological Sciences or Why Do I have to Learn This Stuff? PART I. Univariate Analysis: Describing Variable Distributions Chapter 2. Levels of Measurement and Aggregation Chapter 3. Understanding Data Distributions: Tabular and Graphical Techniques Chapter 4. Measures of Central Tendency Chapter 5. Measures of Dispersion PART II. Making Inferences in Univariate Analysis: Generalizing From a Sample to the Population Chapter 6. Probability, Probability Distributions, and an Introduction to Inferential Testing Chapter 7. Point Estimation and Confidence Intervals Chapter 8. From Estimation to Statistical Tests: Hypothesis Testing for One Population Mean and Proportion PART III. Bivariate Analysis: Relationships Between Two Variables Chapter 9. Testing Hypotheses With Categorical Data Chapter 10. Hypothesis Tests Involving Two Population Means or Proportions Chapter 11. Hypothesis Tests Involving Three or More Population Means: Analysis of Variance Chapter 12. Bivariate Correlation and Regression PART IV. Multivariable Analysis: Predicting One Dependent Variable with Two or More Independent Variables Chapter 13. Controlling for a Third Variable: Multiple OLS Regression Chapter 14. Regression Analysis With a Dichotomous Dependent Variable: Logit Models
