Empirical criminological study Essay

However, there is always a punishment for the criminals and is aimed at changing the behavior of the people who commit the crime. Simply, criminology studies the system of criminal justice as well as the enforcement of laws governing a country. In criminology, criminals are accused and prosecuted according to the extent of their crime. The aim of the essay is to discuss the methods the researchers employ during empirical criminology study. The way the methods are implemented, their appropriateness, weaknesses, and strengths will be explained in relation to the considerations the researchers follow in the planning and conduction of the study. Researchers use empirical methods in criminology to enable them to collect information about the offenses committed by criminals. Similarly, qualitative approaches are better in the criminological study since they provide the valid evidence on the cause of crime as compared to quantitative methods that cannot gather information about the white-collar crime.

Moreover, the qualitative research techniques can be used to complement the quantitative research. For example, they help in informing the research instrument when quantitative data is collected as well as understanding the context of the crime occurrence (Noaks, & Wincup, 2004). Apart from the qualitative methods, quantitative approaches are also used in criminology to study criminal justice and crime. The criminological study involves the experiments to have pre-test and post-test of the gathered facts from the measured variables. For example, such tests are used during classical experiment design in the criminal justice system. If random experiments are conducted on the crime and criminal justice, comparisons help in obtaining the true evidence thus providing good effects of the crime. Randomization also reduces the effect of biases that might interfere with the results of the empirical study among the subject groups.

This enables the researcher to generalize the findings obtained from the variables used. Similarly, the method is efficient, generalizable and cheap even though the methods of the survey may be limited due to the problem of the survey design such as sampling. Thirdly, meta-analysis is an empirical criminology method that relies on analyzing quantitative data from the findings gathered from different studies. The researcher of the empirical criminology pulls the results of different studies together to analyze their statements and summaries to identify the causes of the existing relationship in the crim. For example, the meta-analysis that compared the relationship between delinquency and broken homes. It should be noted that the meta-analysis helps the researcher and the community aware of the inappropriate conclusions deduced from the findings of the study.

The longitudinal research method is part of the empirical criminology approach. It entails cohort and panel studies and studies a single group for a specific period after which it assesses the change in the group. For the cohort research, specific populations are evaluated to determine how criminals engage in their actions. On the other hand, the panel study uses a similar group over a period where the same sets of people are interviewed in more than two times. For instance, in the survey where national crime is victimized (Creswell, & Creswell, 2017). Firstly, the methods explored the reality of the evidence presented in the criminal justice system. The aim was to prove that the offender committed the crime during the stated time. Secondly, the methods enabled the researcher to understand the point of view of the subject thus providing a fair judgment and conclusion about the crime committed.