In this role the researcher observes some location or process without becoming a part of
it in any way?
a. complete participation
b. complete observer
c. participant-as-observer
d. observer-as-participant
The most widely used measures of crime are based on police records and are commonly
referred to as:
a. crimes known to police
b. victimless crimes
c. unreportable crimes
d. none of the above
Which of the following measures of central tendency are the easiest to calculate?
a. mean
b. mode
c. standard deviation
d. median
You are doing research on inmates leaving your state’s prison system during the
calendar year 2006 with respect to their living arrangements upon release. It is assumed
that inmates living with their families will have lower recidivism rates, therefore what
sampling technique would do best to obtain a representative sample?
a. simple random sample
b. quota sample
c. stratified sample
d. snowball sample
Reporters from your local television news affiliate frequently ask people on a pedestrian
shopping street during the lunch hour their opinions about criminal justice issues and
play the responses on the 6:00 news. The reporters are using:
a. reliance on available subjects
b. probability sampling
c. stratified sampling
d. quota sampling
Which of the following would serve as an example of a cross sectional study?
a. Uniform Crime Reports
b. the 2010 U.S. census
c. a single wave of the National Crime Victimization Survey
d. both Uniform Crime Reports and a single wave of the National Crime Victimization
Survey
Which of the following is accurate concerning the use of systematic sampling?
a. systematic sampling is a poor excuse of simple random sampling
b. systematic sampling is often used as a substitute for stratified sampling
c. systematic sampling is frequently used rather than a simple random sample
d. systematic sampling is always considered a non-probability sampling technique
Crime surveys where respondents are asked about their experiences as victims of crime
have the potential to cause
a. physical trauma to the researcher
b. psychological harm
c. false data as participants always fabricate information to avoid revealing
embarrassing details
d. crime rates to increase
The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in
a. a maximum security prison
b. a laboratory
c. a death row wing of a federal penitentiary
d. a mental hospital
Professor Jenkins is interested in attitudes toward the trying juveniles as adults and
plans to assess support for this hypothesis by asking whether or not subjects say they
would travel to countries that allow juveniles to stand trial as an adult. Critics would
say this measure lacks:
a. face validity
b. criterion-related validity
c. content validity
d. construct validity
On which of the following variables is it appropriate to use a Pearson’s productmoment
correlation as a means of
measuring association?
a. gender
b. number of arrests
c. race
d. all of the above
Which of the following would not be an example of a program’s goal statement?
a. to encourage participants to take responsibility for their actions
b. to study why some offenders were allowed in the program and others were not
c. to provide a safer community through the use of Neighborhood Watch programs
d. to provide life skills to inmates to participate in the pre-release program
Monitoring the Future is a survey that targets a specific population, namely:
a. high school teachers
b. high school seniors
c. parents of high school seniors
d. high school counselors
Field research is not especially appropriate for topics that:
a. are not easily quantifiable
b. need to be examined in their natural setting
c. require the generation of a theory
d. are limited to aggregate data
What is the main distinction between measurement and operationalization?
a. measurement involves actually making observations and assigning scores to those
observations
b. operationalization involves actually making observations and assigning scores to
those observations
c. the operationalization process starts much earlier, usually with conceptualization
d. there is not a difference between the terms
Research involving which of the following groups would not be receptive to the use of
unstructured interviews?
a. criminals
b. police officers
c. judges
d. probation officers
This term represents a set of concepts and the proposed relationships among these; a
structure that is intended to represent or model something about the world.
a. a paradigm
b. a law
c. a theory
d. a fact
The total variation is calculated in much the same way as the:
a. mean
b. mode
c. chi square
d. standard deviation
Which of the following represent potential problems with the use of open-ended
questions?
a. possibility of misunderstanding and researcher bias
b. they can be quickly completed by the respondent
c. they do not limit the responses received
d. they result in lack of uniformity of answers
Which of the following would allow a researcher to measure change in a general
population over time?
a. trend study
b. cohort study
c. panel study
d. cross-sectional study
The primary advantage of the unstructured interview is that it provides:
a. more specific data
b. more numerical data
c. more interaction with participants
d. more breadth of information
Which of the following is not utilized in the process of gaining access to formal
organizations:
a. sponsor
b. cold call
c. letter
d. meeting
Which of the following may be a concern if we are interested in studying “career drug
dealers” and we use our
friend from the probation department to act as our informant into that subculture?
a. those getting probation may be first time offenders
b. those getting probation have obviously been caught, thus will not reflect those that
have more skill and have not been apprehended
c. there may be some drug dealers who entered into plea negotiations and plead to
possession instead of dealing
d. all of the above
We can understand something by knowing the why before the what.
a. True
b. False
Data collected by other researchers is often used to address new research questions.
a. True
b. False
Under what conditions would it be appropriate to use a snowball sampling technique?
a. when the characteristic of interest to the study is a deviant one and only a small
number of people who know one another are required
b. when your questionnaire can be administered in a narrow geographic area
c. when all you need to do is interview persons from a population where the sampling
frame is known
d. when the researcher absolutely must have a sample that is representative of the
population from which it is drawn
Paradigm shifts are:
a. shifted to resemble concepts
b. concepts shifted to paradigms
c. previously agreed on paradigms that are discarded in favor of new ones
d. previously agreed upon paradigms that are changed over to a hypothesis
As opposed to survey research, a qualitative interview is more:
a. data driven
b. interactive
c. difficult to do
d. linear
In criminal justice research, there is a great deal of variation in what or who is
studiedwhich are technically known
as
a. causal inference
b. population sampling distributions
c. trend studies
d. units of analysis
Nonprobability sampling cannot be used in criminal justice research.
a. True
b. False