Counting Crime

This chapter deals with the collection and interpritation of cime statistics. Over the past century, those who have tried to undertand crime have relied heavily on statistical descriptions of criminal behavior, criminals, and the criminal justice response. What we know about crime depends on the quality, coverage, reliability and validity of our measures of crime.
This chapter will describe how social scientists count crime. After discussing the problems of the validity and reliability of our measures of crime, we will introduce the long standing debate over whether crime statistics accurately reflect the amount of crime in Canada or whether they merely relfect the activity of the criminal justice system. To help you to understand the strenghts and weaknesses of Canadian crime statistics, we descibe how the administrative records of the police, courts and prisons are turned into measures describing the amount of crime and the characteristics of offenders an victims. This process involves developing clear procedures concerning units of count, levels of data aggregation definitions, deata elements and counting procedures. Particular attention will be paid to the most commonly used measure of crime: the Uniform Crime Report system(UCR). The UCR is basd on crimes reported to the police across the country. Finally, the chapter describes victimization surveys and self-report studies. These provide data that are complimentary to those produced by the UCR.

Project Due Date Changed

Hi guys...hopefully you all get a chance to read this before tomorrow's class. I have had numerous students ask for clarification on how to present their projects. Also, many are unsure of how to interprit their results. I will push the presentation deadline to Thursday November 1 (I realize this is a day after Halloween) Tomorrow we will spend a bit of time of how I want the project to look and then we will move on to the next chapter which will look at crime figures and how to interprit them.
See you all tomorrow.

Vancouver Police Museum/Walk

Yesterday and today we went to the Vancouver Police Museum . The day was split between working in the museum and walking through Chinatown, Gastown and the Downtown East Side. An interesting couple of days...I am glad to be writing this post from the comforts of my living room. I am not one for cold weather.
I want you to write a blog post expressing what you learned from the field trip. What did you like/dislike...please explain how to make this field trip better for next year.

Continuing work on Project

The last two classes have been spent working on your experiments. By now most groups have developed their surveys and scales. Make sure you have talked to the appropriate teachers to arrange a time when your group can come in and go over your survey.
Choose your age group carefully.

The next few days are going to be a bit hectic....with the Breaking Down Barriers workshop and field trips...be prepared to work with some of your group member not being there.

Deadline for the project is going October 30/12....YOU WILL BE PRESENTING ON THIS DAY

Violence/Media Cont.

Today we focused on working in groups to figure out the best way to implement the experiment.
Questions to consider:

• what kind of survey/questionairre....how many questions
• grade level/ what teachers should we talk to
• type of media to use.....images/video
• scale....the different ways to weigh it...

Students should divide the tasks so as not to repeat the steps....

Criminology Experiment

Today we continued our discussion on violence and media. We will be starting our project where you will get a chance to conduct a criminology experiment on your fellow students. The focus will be on how violence affects children. Today we spent time researching the links between the two.  Some of the things we discussed was ethics. This is an example of a famous experiment that called into question the ethics of the researcher.

Next day we will be working on formulating a hypothesis and designing a methodology to test this hypothesis by means of an experiment.

The Great Pumpkin Experiment

  

 

We discussed the Scientific Method today....handout on how an experiement is done.
After much discussion we decided to look at the issue of pumpkin size and number of seeds.
Students go into groups and carved up the pumpkins to count the seeds. The students tested their hypothesis and will now chart their results and look at formulating their conclusions.

We start your criminology experiments next class!!!