Question

What is the purpose of measures of association in criminal justice research?

Generally, explain their role as it relates to evaluating claims about theories of crime causation or program/policy effectiveness. Use an example to illustrate your point.

Answer 1

The purpose of measure of association, that is, correlation in criminal justice research is to determine the relationship between the concerning crime and the response to the crime.

Most of the researches in criminal justice are correlational studies that attempt to identify various factors that can be associated with the specific categories of criminal behaviour.

The measure of association helps in determining the hypotheses about the causes of the crimes. They help in exploring the impact of policies, programs and daily practices whether they are helpful in reducing the crime or not.

The criteria needed to establish causation are;

• Association between dependent and independent variables.
• The independent variable must precede the dependent variable in time.
• The association between the variables should be due to some unobserved third variable.

Example:

What can be the psychological conditions of a rapist? Here, the behaviour of the rapist can be studied in order the determine the possible reasons with the use of correlation and then testing makes it sufficient to say that whether that particular behaviour can be one of the reasons of the crime.

After identifying the possible causes, the management programs can be made that can help in crime management and latter its effectiveness can be seen.