Which of the following would be an example of the data coming from the Census
Bureau that have criminal justice applications?
a. Court records of Children in Custody
b. Self Report Survey data
c. Survey of Inmates in Local Jails
d. Survey of all Criminal Justice Professors
When information is gathered by researchers and there are no identifying characteristics
allowing the researchers to match up results to individual subjects, this illustrates
_____.
a. confidentiality
b. the absence of deception
c. anonymity
d. assurance of voluntary participation
When we attempt to answer questions about why something happens the purpose of our
research is _____.
a. exploration
b. description
c. explanation
d. application
Which of the following statements is NOT accurate?
a. It is often as important to know that two things are not related as to know that they
are related.
b. Researchers are not ethically obligated to admit mistakes they made doing their
research.
c. Unexpected findings need not be reported.
d. Researchers do not need to respond to court orders.
Which of the following does not represent potential problems in doing evaluation
research?
a. conflicting goals
b. vague goals
c. when the intended actions and goals are linked through empirical evidence.
d. difficulty in expressing policy goals in the “if-then” form that can be empirically
tested
Which of the following statements is true concerning the relationship between standard
error and sample size?
a. there is a positive relationship
b. there is an inverse relationship
c. As sample size decreases, the standard error decreases.
d. As sample size increases, the standard error increases.
Which of the following would be an example of social artifacts as units of analysis?
a. newspaper editorials
b. probation officers
c. students
d. professors
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
Problem analysis, coupled with scientific realism, helps public officials use:
a. research to select different methods
b. research to measure the effects of policies
c. research to determine which program to start
d. research to select and assess alternative courses of action
What time of the year would be best to do an observational study of thefts from cars
parked at shopping malls?
a. early in the year, January ” February
b. early summer, June ” July
c. late summer, August
d. late in the year, December
Traditional approaches to finding cause and effect usually try to isolate causal
mechanisms from other possible influences while the scientific realist approach _____.
a. views these other possible influences as deviations
b. views these other possible influences as causal mechanisms
c. views these other possible influences as contexts in which causal mechanisms operate
d. views these other possible influences as true causes
FBI statistics and annual reports from the Federal Bureau of Prisons are examples of
_____.
a. nonpublic agency records
b. new data collected by agency staff
c. published statistics
d. content analysis
Which of the following is not correct with respect to process evaluations?
a. information about program implementation can be linked to outcome measures, even
when accompanied by a process evaluation
b. process evaluation aids in interpreting results from impact assessments
c. process evaluations are useful when a researcher is interested in the performance of
specific tasks within a program
d. process evaluations assume that tasks within a program are linked to program
outcomes
Which of the following is not a variable-oriented strategy for research?
a. realist approach
b. experimental approach
c. case-study approach
d. all of these
What type of variable allows you to arrange attributes from greater than to less than, but
does not allow you to tell how much greater or how much less than one attribute is from
another?
a. nominal
b. ordinal
c. interval
d. ratio
Which of the following would be an example of selection bias?
a. volunteers
b. random assignment to experimental and control groups
c. matching on experimental and comparison groups
d. a double blind experiment.
If you have concluded that a particular pattern exists and have developed a general
understanding of why, you may be tempted to ignore facts in the future that don”t fit. If
you do, you have just made what error?
a. inaccurate observation
b. overgeneralization
c. illogical reasoning
d. selective observation
The letter to a formal organization should include all of the following topics except
__________.
a. the purpose of your research
b. who is funding your research
c. the action that you request someone to do for you
d. name your sponsor within the organization
Which of the following is not an advantage of the use of matrix questions?
a. they are faster to complete for respondents
b. they do not take much thought on the part of the respondents to answer
c. they use space efficiently
d. the format increases the comparability of responses given to different questions for
the respondent as well as the researcher
Experimental mortality is also known as ________.
a. selection
b. regression
c. attrition
d. relevance
Information that is collected by other people often as a part of their day-to-day work in
a justice agency, but used by someone else for research purposes is referred to as
________________________ of existing data.
A scientific realist approach to examining mechanisms in context bridges
a. Dependent and independent approaches
b. idiographic and nomothetic approaches to causation
c. truth and reality
d. sample and population differences
In order to protect juvenile delinquents since they are a special population, researchers
should do all of the following except _____.
a. make sure there are no repercussions if juvenile delinquents choose not to participate
in the research
b. offer the juvenile delinquents money to participate
c. have at least one member of the institutional review board be either a juvenile
delinquent or someone designated to represent the interests of the juvenile delinquents s
d. do not expose juvenile delinquents to risks that would be considered excessive for
non- juvenile delinquent subjects
Having trouble reconciling general patterns of attitudes and actions with individual
exceptions the research personally knows of is termed the __________?
a. individualistic fallacy
b. ecological fallacy
c. observational fallacy
d. personal fallacy
Which of the following is not a key ethical issue addressed by informed consent?
a. allowing the subject to weigh the benefits of participation against the potential risks
b. ensuring that participation is voluntary
c. making sure that all ethical problems are accounted for
d. allowing police officers to use excessive force.
To calculate the mean for grouped data, which of the following steps must be
completed?
a. multiply the number of subjects within each category by the value of that category
b. divide the results of the multiplication
c. multiply by the number of subjects
d. multiply each large number with the smaller numbers
The NVCS is based on a nationally representative sample of _____.
a. arrests
b. offenders
c. households
d. types of crime
When calculating the mean, the researcher should use data measured at which level?
a. nominal
b. ordinal
c. interval
d. both interval and ordinal
Which of the following are necessary in the construction of closed-ended questions?
a. the response categories may or may not be mutually exclusive
b. the response categories must be exhaustive
c. the researcher must focus on expanding responses
d. the response categories must be dichotomous
When dealing with stakeholders a researcher should be aware of all of the following
except _____.
a. be able to identify all the stakeholders
b. get particularly friendly with the stakeholders so they will not interfere with your
research
c. find out the stakeholders’ perspectives on the program
d. find out the stakeholders’ perspectives on the evaluation
Which of the following is true about longitudinal research?
a. Data are useless
b. changes in the operational definitions the agencies use to specify key terms does not
change overtime
c. the procedures the agency uses to collect the data over time remain the same
d. as the time interval under investigation increases, so does the potential for change in
measurement.
When we ask people for information, they will respond using a filter of what will make
them look good. This is known as ____________.
Delinquency, victimless crimes, and crimes rarely observed may be measured by
self-report studies.
The National Jail Census collects information every five years about federal prisons.
Validity refers to the degree to which a measure covers a single range of meanings
included within the concept.
There are no nationwide efforts to ________________ collect self-report measures to
all types of crimes.
Ethical considerations in research are always evident.
Data and records produced by formal organizations may be the most common source of
data in criminal justice research.
Units of communication, such as words, paragraphs, and books, are not the units of
analysis in content analysis.
Estimates of population parameters, standard error, and confidence intervals assume
unbiased sampling. The foundation of unbiased sampling is the ___________________.
A(n) _____________ is a complex set of relationships among several concepts.
The middle attribute, or the ____________, is the measure that divides the distribution
so that half the scores are higher and half are lower.
Casual human inquiry is a more rigorous way of investigation than probability and
causality.
Construct validity refers to generalizing from what we observe and measure to the
real-world things in which we are interested.
Most explanatory social research uses a probabilistic model of causation.
Field research is often associated with qualitative techniques.
When there is a study of a large number of variables that are associated with a small
number of cases or subjects, the researcher is engaged in
__________________________ research.
Learning policy goals is a key first step in doing ________________.