Encyclopedia of Sociology

CRIMINOLOGY

kinds of data they will use to study crime, and the
kinds of explanations and theories they will apply
to understand crime and criminal behavior.

HOW IS CRIME STUDIED?

Having made choices about definitions, criminologists
are then faced with an array of data and method-
ologies that can be brought to bear on criminological
questions. The data and methodological approach
used should be dictated by the definition of crime
and the research question being asked. Some very
interesting research problems require analysis of
quantitative data while others require that the
researcher use qualitative approaches to study
crime or a criminal justice process. For example, if
one is trying to describe the socio-demographic
characteristics of criminals then one of several
means of counting crimes and people who engage
in them might be used. On the other hand, in his
book On The Take (1978), because Chambliss was
interested in the source and nature of organized
crime, it was clearly more appropriate for him to
spend time in the field observing and interviewing,
rather than simply counting.

Methods of Criminological Research. For the
most part, criminologists use the same types of
research methods as do other sociologists. But a
unique quality of crime is its ‘‘hiddenness.’’ The
character of crime means that those who do it hide
it. As a result, the criminologist must be a bit of a
detective even while engaged in social science
research. To do this criminologists use observa-
tional studies such as those conducted by Chambliss
(1978) in studying organized crime, or Fisse and
Braithwaite (1987) in studies of white-collar crime,
or Sanchez-Jankowski (1992) in his studies of
gang crime.

Those who use quantitative methods frequently
use data generated by the criminal justice system,
victimization surveys, or self-reports. All of these
data collection procedures have strengths and weak-
nesses, and they are best used by criminologists
who have an appreciation of both. The most wide-
ly used criminal justice data are produced by po-
lice departments and published by the Federal
Bureau Investigation each year in their Uniform
Crime Reports (UCR). The UCR contains counts of
the crimes reported to police, arrest data (includ-
ing some characteristics of those arrested), police

manpower statistics, and other data potentially of

interest to researchers. Victimization surveys may

be conducted by individuals or teams of research-

ers. The National Crime Victimization Survey

(NCVS) is conducted annually by the federal gov-

ernment and, as a consequence, is widely used.

The virtue of victimization surveys is that they

include criminal acts that are never reported to the

police. As their name indicates, self-report studies

simply ask a sample of people about their involve-

ment in criminal activity. If done correctly, it is

quite surprising what people will report to researchers.

Characteristics of criminals. It is always risky

to speak of the characteristics of criminals because

of the problems with crime data mentioned above.

Also, one must take care to specify the types of

crimes included in any description of those charac-

teristics correlated with criminal involvement. For

example, those engaging in white-collar crime have

very different characteristics than perpetrators of

what might be called ‘‘common crimes’’ or ‘‘street

crime.’’ In order to engage in white-collar crime,

one has to be old enough to have a white-collar job,

and possess those characteristics (such as educa-

tion) requisite for those jobs. Without these same

requirements, the perpetrators of street crime can

reasonably be expected to look different from

white-collar criminals.

Criminologists frequently speak of ‘‘the big

four correlates of crime’’: age, sex, race, and social

class. The first two are rather uncomplicated. Crime

is, for the most part, a young person’s activity

(Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983). Probable involve-

ment escalates in the teen years reaching a peak at

between ages 15 and 17 and then drops. Most

people stop participating in criminal activity by

their mid to late twenties, even if they have not

been arrested, punished, or rehabilitated. The

correlation between sex and crime is also quite

straightforward. Males are more likely to engage

in crime than females. Criminologists have not

found a society where this pattern does not hold.

The correlation between race, or ethnicity,

and crime is complex. Most Americans when asked

state that they believe that minorities commit more

crimes than whites. This oversimplification is not

only inaccurate, but it obscures important pat-

terns. First, some nonwhites in the United States

are from groups with lower crime rates than whites