Bias in the processing of crime data: A comparison of police and social scientist constructs of the drug/homicide nexus.
Item
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Title
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Bias in the processing of crime data: A comparison of police and social scientist constructs of the drug/homicide nexus.
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Identifier
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AAI9108170
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identifier
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9108170
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Creator
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Ryan, Patrick Joseph.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Antony E. Simpson
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Date
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1990
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, Criminology and Penology | Sociology, Theory and Methods | Information Science
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Abstract
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The dissertation addresses the question: Are the police a valid source for criminologically useful data? It compares two sets of data describing the identical sample of criminal homicides in New York City, 1988. The findings demonstrate that research data collected by an agency whose raison d'etre is not scientific inquiry and data collected by social scientists, will produce quite dissimilar constructs of "what happened" regards the crime studied.;The sociology of knowledge provides a theoretical basis upon which to posit that a tension between the tacit knowledge of persons in different fields will naturally and irreversibly lead to disagreement in how each interpret, first, the phenomenon observed and then, the verbiage used to systematically record it.;Recommendation is made that researchers who rely on public agencies for research data limit the idiom of their operational definitions to those most easily comprehended by the practitioner. The study also strongly suggests that if crime data is to be meaningful for the purposes of social scientists, collection methods should always include a follow-up interview in which mutual understanding of events and the variables used to record them can be elaborated and clarified.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
