Measuring Crime and Criminality

by John MacDonald (Editor)

Overview

Measuring Crime and Criminality focuses on how different approaches to measuring crime and criminality are used to test existing criminological theories. Each chapter reviews a key approach for measuring criminal behavior and discusses its strengths or weaknesses for explaining the facts of crime or answers to central issues of criminological inquiry. The book describes the state of the field on different approaches for measuring crime and criminality as seen by prominent scholars in the field.Among the featured contributions are: The Use of Official Reports and Victimization Data for Testing Criminological Theories; The Design and Analysis of Experiments in Criminology; and Growth Curve/Mixture Models for Measuring Criminal Careers. Also included are papers titled: Counterfactual Methods of Causal Inference and Their Application to Criminology; Measuring Gene-Environment Interactions in the Cause of Antisocial Behavior and What Has Been Gained and Lost through Longitudinal Research and Advanced Statistical Models? This volume of Advances in Criminological Theory illustrates how understanding the various ways criminal behavior is measured is useful for developing theoretical insights on the causes of crime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138511965
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/06/2017
Series:	Advances in Criminological Theory
Pages:	403
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Measurement of Crime and Estimating Treatment Effects in Criminology, 1. The Self-Report Method and the Development of Criminological Theory, 2. Socially Desirable Response Bias in Criminology: An Example of Its Effect in Testing the Effects of Self-Control, 3. How Do We Measure the Severity of Crimes? New Estimates of the Cost of Criminal Victimization, 4. Communities and Crime Theories: Construct Validation Deficits, a Paucity of Comparisons, and a Boudon–Coleman Metamodel Resolution, 5. The Coming of a Networked Criminology?, 6. What Can Genetically Informed Research Tell Us about the Causes of Crime?, 7. Bounding Disagreements about Treatment Effects with an Application to Criminology, 8. Randomized Experiments and the Advancement of Criminological Theory, 9. Causal Inference via Natural Experiments and Instrumental Variables: The Effect of “Knifing Off” from the Past, 10. Criminal Career Research: A Statistical and Substantive Comparison of Growth Modeling Approaches, 11. Understanding Desistance: Theory Testing with Formal Empirical Models, 12. Meta-Analysis and the Relative Support for Various Criminological Theories, Contributors, Index