Hi Hive!
I hope everyone is doing fine and dandy!
Today I decided to talk again about my studies, passion and you know the whole Criminology stuff!
For today's topic I have chosen understating of research methods ❤️
How to understand crime, first you need to understand all the elements involved into crime like : offenders, victims, criminal justice, punishment and other things I will try my best to cover in my posts!
There is many aspects to criminology, many sub studies, many little branches.
Some people will be interested in Racism and Racial Injustices, other people will go into feminism, and some will focus on Crimes of the Powerful (I’m still looking at you Bezos).
Many of us goes into this specific study because we want to make a change, change in justice system, punishment system, sort out some equalities, or find out why poor people get fucked over on every step of their way.
In most cases people choose academic route of research and study but we also have practical people that can make a difference that doesn’t involve getting education in particular topic.
Like police officers and prison officers (I will actually do a post one day about how to become one or another without getting a degree in policing or criminology. I spent 5 months training to be a police officer, however, I changed my mind because I’m not cut to do this type of job, plus I’m not willing to give up my lifestyle. Also, someone close to me is a prison officer and he is wiling to help me with a post at some point as well)
Despite my actual experience in forensic, criminology, dead bodies and all that stuff, I’m talking here from academical point of view, I will with time, explain all different parts, however, I can’t take you on a journey around dead stuff just yet 😊
When we study science, we see many biological and chemical phenomenons and what do we do?
We do research, we try to understand how everything works, why it works the way it does.
Kind of similar with criminology, sociology, we need our research to be able understand why racism happens, why crime happens of any sort really, why we have so many suicides, so many inequalities all around the bloody world.
Durkhein said ‘we are content to reflect upon our ideas, analysing and combining them. Instead of science which deals with realities, we carry no more than ideological analysis’
The thing with such a theoretical thing as criminology, there is no universal method that works in every case. Humans are annoying this way; they don’t work by a pattern.
When we are facing a certain theory, we can’t just take the information out of nowhere. We have to ask questions, the right questions.
We must design a study around a certain theory, collect data, analyse it.
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense, then you have to go for it, make sure you interpret the date well, present the data to other people involved, nothing feels better than a good ol’ fashioned brainstorm.
Research is never binary here, there is no wrong or right answer, not everything is how it seems, remember.
We have four areas of difference.
PHILOSOPHY:
- Helps to understand the values of different aspects of the world, it’s very strongly connected to morals and how we should act due to a personal moral code.
We have some subtypes of philosophy I want to briefly focus on.
ONTOLOGY that divides to Objectivist and Constructive one.
Objectivist ontology presents us with a concept that everyone is born into a pre-existing social construct, social rules and norms are pressured on everyone. The whole culture exists independently from people, they are socialised to understand the values of the culture. Things exist, no matter if individuals going to get involved or now.
Constructive ontology presents a social phenomenon that is strictly connected to people that are acting as a part of this construct.
That’s where we must pay attention to language and representation as it can shape our perception of reality.
One aspect presents us with a theory that everything around us is an external reality that is created without our participation, the other one completely disagrees with it.
Like you see, there is no easy way to study this, that’s why we need to look on epistemology!
Positive Epistemology :
- Applying natural sciences methods to social science research.
- Objective, value-free research
- Deductive, theory testing
- Scientific approach
Interpretivist Epistemology :
- Interpretive understanding of social action
- Inductive, theory building
- Understanding meaning ( Hermeneutic tradition)
- Subjective reality (aka putting yourself in others person shoes)
- Social world is not objective, so that’s why there is a need for non-scientific methods.
When I was studying it, I got a little bit confused and I wasn’t sure what should come first, theory or research. Because honestly, it’s never clear.
Shall we use inductive reasoning and work out the problem, it’s cause how to solve it or shall we go by deductive reasoning and use generally accepted theory and try to explain our problem this way? Literally by finding evidence that suit the theory.
Remember I said there are four different areas of research and study?
First one is the philosophy, the second one is the one every person that ever did science will get: methodology.
Deductivism would be very up to adjust the case to the pre existing theory.
Theory Data
The explicit hypothesis is used to accept or reject the case study, quantitative study.
Inductivism focus on understanding a problem and then working out how it was solved individually.
Data-> Theory
Qualitative research and grounded theory.
Methodology is the approach; method is a tool used to solve the problem.
Methods have no rules, but the way you collect the data, interpret the data, and see a data can tell us a lot. The research needs to guid the design no other way around.
I know it would be amazingly fabulous to just go ‘Yeah, their did this because of that and that’s it, there is no more to it’ Unfortunately humans are super complicated, challenging and generally it’s never bloody easy.
I love the fact I can rant about it here. I’m glad @ashtv made me join it (sounds kinda weird hahah, no gun to my head, no bullying 😊)
I think I’m going to stop here actually, I still have the process and design to discuss but I don’t want people to fall asleep. I could talk about it like all day but not all of you are crazy, so I will stop here, yes ^^
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING!
HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY!