assistance with AJ 301-O2A Research Methods in Administration of Justice To score better

• Recognize why criminal justice practitioners need to know about research methodologies.
• Describe the various methods by which we know things.
• Recognize that much of what we know is based on consensus rather than our own experience.
• Recognize how experience and methodical observation play a role in criminal justice research.
• Recognize the various study objectives.
• Recognize how to plan a study project.
• Be able to conduct a research literature review.
• Explain how to compose a research proposal.

• Notice why researchers may fail to recognize whether their own study appropriately addresses ethical concerns.
• Describe how ethical questions typically entail balancing the potential benefits of research against the risk of harm to study subjects.
• Recognize how the rule of voluntary involvement can clash with generalizability.
• Give examples of the unique ethical issues that criminal justice research can pose.
• Talk about how informed consent handles a variety of ethical issues.

Prepare to provide a synopsis of a journal article in week four.

The student will do an internet search and summarise one journal article relevant to his or her employment in the field of justice administration/criminal justice/criminology. The summary consists of determining (a) the article's title; (b) the authors; (c) the year of publication and page count; (d) whether an abstract was included, and if so, describing it in a few lines; (e) What is the research question and hypotheses, if any; (f) What is the research goal/purpose; (g) How many pages did the literature review part take; (h) what was the data source and how were the data collected? (i) What study design was utilized in the article; (j) What findings or results of statistical analysis; (k) What was the researcher's conclusion; (l) the length of the reference list.

Justice Quarterly, Journal of Criminal Justice Education, American Journal of Criminal Justice, Police Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, and others are examples of relevant periodicals.
Just carefully follow the directions, step by step.

• Understand the foundations of social science: theory, data collection, and data analysis.
• Recognize the fundamental differences between social sciences and other ways of looking at social phenomena: talk language of theory, not philosophy; aggregates, not individuals, and language.
• Understand differing Avenues for inquiry; distinguish idiographic from nomothetic explanations; inductive from deductive reasoning; quantitative and qualitative approaches 
• Recognize how explanatory scientific research centers on the notion of cause and effect and the three basic requirements for establishing a causal relationship in science.
• Understand the role of validity and threats to validity of causal inference.
• Describe different units of analysis in criminal justice research, and the possibility of ecological fallacy.
• Understand the time dimension, together with the differences between cross-sectional and longitudinal research. 

• Understand the role of concepts as summary devices for bringing together observations and experiences that have something in common.
• Explain how concepts are mental images that do not exist in the real world.
• Describe how operationalization specifies concrete empirical procedures for measuring variables.
• Recognize that operationalization begins with study design but continues through the duration of research.
• Explain why measurement categories must be mutually exclusive and exhaustive.
• Distinguish different levels of measurement and the properties of different levels.
• Understand precision, reliability, and validity as dimensions of measurement quality.
• Recognize how different approaches to measuring crime illustrate general principles of conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement.
• Understand what crimes are included in different measures.
• Describe different measures of crime and how they are based on different units of analysis.
• Understand different purposes for collecting crime data.
• Explain different measures based on crimes known to police.
• Describe the main features of victim surveys.
• Distinguish the main differences between crimes known to police and crimes measured through different types of surveys.
• Understand why self-report measures are used and list different types of crimes for which they are appropriate.
• Summarize major series of self-reported measures of drug use.

• Recognize that experiments are ideal for the controlled testing of causal processes as well as some assessment studies.
• Explain how the classical experiment uses pretesting and posttesting of experimental and control groups to determine the effect of an experimental stimulus on a dependent variable.
• Explain why random assignment is the best technique to ensure that the experimental and control groups are comparable.
• Explain how the standard experiment with random subject assignment protects against the majority of the risks to internal validity.
•  Recognize that the controlled conditions in which studies are conducted may limit our ability to apply findings to real-world constructions or other situations.
• Recognize how the traditional experiment can be altered by altering the number of experimental and control groups, the number and types of experimental stimuli, and the number of pretest and posttest measurements.
• Understand why quasi-experiments are used when an experimental design is not possible or desired and be able to define different types of quasi-experiments.

• Recognize how the logic of probability sampling allows huge populations to be represented by small subsets of those populations.
• Recognize that the degree to which a sample is representative of the population from which it was drawn is the most important criterion for its quality.
• State the main premise of probability sampling: every member of the population has a known, nonzero chance of being chosen for the sample.
• Explain how probability sampling methods allow for the selection of samples that are highly representative.
• Recognize that the most fundamental technique in probability sampling is simple random sampling.

• Recognize that survey research entails the systematic distribution of questionnaires to a sample of respondents drawn from a population.
• Explain why survey research is particularly well suited to descriptive or exploratory studies involving large populations.
• Give examples of how surveys are used to collect victimization and self-reported offending data.
• Explain the distinctions between open-ended and closed-ended inquiries, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of each.
•  Recognize how bias in questionnaire items encourages respondents to respond in a certain way or endorse a certain viewpoint.
• Explain the three methods for administering questionnaires and give examples of how they can be changed.
• Give examples of the benefits and drawbacks of each survey administration approach.

• Examine how survey data can be fake and potentially superficial.
• Be able to define field research as a form of data collecting that entails direct observation of phenomena in their natural environments.
• Recognize that field observation is often the best way for gathering information about physical or social environments, behavior, and events.
• Recognize that criminal justice field research can yield qualitative or quantitative data.
• Recognize the optimal sampling strategies for field research and when they should be employed.
• Recognize the many methods for documenting field observations, including video, audio, and other equipment, as well as unstructured field notes.
• Summarize how field research compares to other methods in terms of validity and reliability.

• Recognize that government agencies generate statistics and data that are frequently useful to criminal justice scholars.
• Give examples of nonpublic agency records that can be used as research data in criminal justice.
• Describe why researchers should be aware of potential reliability and validity issues with agency records.
• Explain why content analysis is a good research tool for researching communications.
• Explain how to use coding to convert raw data into a standardized, quantifiable format.
• Explain how secondary analysis refers to the examination of data gathered by another researcher for a different reason.
• Have access to criminal justice data archives maintained by the ICPSR and the NACJD.
• Recognize how secondary data's benefits and drawbacks are similar to those of agency records.

• As examples of applied research in criminal justice, summarise evaluation research and problem analysis.
• Explain the role of an evaluability assessment.
• Explain how various types of evaluation activities correspond to different stages of the policy-making process.
• Recognize the need for a well-defined problem, relevant measurements, and success or failure criteria in the assessment study.
• Compare and contrast assessment research designs with other designs.
•  Describe the benefits, constraints, and limitations of randomized field trials.
• Summarize the significance of process assessments performed separately or in conjunction with an effective assessment.
• Explain how problem analysis can be utilized as a planning tool that uses the same social science research methods as program assessment.
• Describe how the scientific realist approach emphasizes context-specific mechanisms above generalizable causal processes.
• Give an example of how problem analysis tools, crime mapping, and other space-based techniques are increasingly being used by criminal justice agencies.
• Describe the logistical, ethical, and political challenges that evaluation research poses.