The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics is the most comprehensive Bureau of
Justice Statistics publication. It includes a multitude of data including all of the
following except _____.
a. characteristics of criminal justice agencies
b. public opinion answers coming from the Gallup Poll
c. complete crime data from all local police departments
d. specific data on states using capital punishment and their execution statistics
Your college has implemented a new policy on campus regarding underage drinking.
You want to evaluate its effects. The purpose of your research is _____.
a. exploration
b. description
c. explanation
d. application
Which of the following is not an effective role (in the sense that the researcher could
affect what he/she is studying) for a field researcher?
a. total observation
b. total participation
c. participant-as-observer
d. observer-as-participant
In determining which role to assume while doing field research which of the following
should the research consider?
a. ethical and methodological considerations
b. how much money they have to do the research
c. who their subjects are
d. whether they will be using subjects in formal or informal organizations
All of the following may represent errors when constructing items for a questionnaire
except for _____.
a. the researcher uses long and complicated items
b. the negation of a question
c. the researcher uses short items
d. the researcher uses a combination question when they only want a single answer
Contingency questions are appropriate when _____.
a. certain questions are clearly relevant to only some of the respondents and irrelevant
to others
b. you want the respondents to write out an answer
c. you want the respondents to rank their answers on a scale
d. you want to impress the respondents with your questions
The production report generated at the city police department contains the number of
arrests made by each officer on a monthly basis. What level of measurement would
number of arrests be?
a. nominal
b. ordinal
c. interval
d. ratio
Units of analysis are typically also the units of __________.
a. observation
b. crime
c. interaction
d. fallacy
What type of study attempts to account for errors in drawing a sample by measuring the
same people on two or more occasions?
a. cohort study
b. panel study
c. trend study
d. cross-sectional study
Bivariate and multivariate analyses are aimed primarily at _____.
a. description
b. exploration
c. explanation
d. application
Violence in children’s programming is a major research endeavor that requires counting
the number of violent acts in Saturday morning cartoons for an entire year. The units of
analysis being used for this project are _____.
a. social artifacts
b. individuals
c. groups
d. organizations
When using inferential statistics all of the following assumptions are accurate except
_____.
a. the sample must be drawn from the population about which inferences are being
made
b. the inferential statistics assume simple random sampling
c. as long as the sample is drawn from a population that resembles the one about which
inferences are to be made, the resulting statistic has value
d. inferential statistics are addressed to sampling error only, they do not consider
non-sampling errors
Which of the following is an accurate example of threats to internal validity of
experiments?
a. subjects dropping out of an experiment
b. selecting a random sample
c. both a & b are threats to internal validity
d. none of the above
If a cross-sectional study can be likened to a ‘snapshot,” and a trend study to a ‘slide
show,” then which of the following is most like a “motion picture?”
a. longitudinal study
b. retrospective study
c. prospective study
d. panel study
Quota samples, judgmental samples, snowball samples, and convenience samples are
all examples of _____.
a. nonprobability sampling
b. probability sampling
c. sampling distributions
d. sampling frames
Concepts are ______.
a. empirical measurements
b. variables
c. mental images
d. hypotheses
Which of the following is inaccurate concerning the construction of explanatory
bivariate tables?
a. the cases are divided into groups according to attributes of the independent variable
b. each of the subgroups is then described in terms of attributes of the dependent
variable
c. the table is read by comparing the independent variable subgroups with one another
in terms of a given attribute of the dependent variable
d. the cases are divided into groups according to attributes of the levels of
measurement.
When attempting to make sure that what you are looking at is what you intended to
look at, you avoid _____.
a. overgeneralization
b. inaccurate observation
c. illogical reasoning
d. miscalculations
Which of the following would not impact the validity and reliability of a study using
agency records?
a. discretion of prosecutors in who to charge and what counts to add
b. decisions that are made by police officers to arrest versus give a warning
c. recognition on the part of the researcher that criminal justice data is a composite of
criminal behavior, ability to detect that behavior and decisions about system response to
that behavior
d. decisions made by probation officers to revoke on new crimes and not technical
violations
In Widom’s research purpose on the relationship between early child abuse and later
delinquency or adult criminal behavior was ___________:
a. Valid and reliable
b. critical and valid
c. explanatory
d. exploratory
With the use of stratified sampling a researcher wants to _____.
a. reduce the sampling error
b. reduce the standard error
c. reduce the number of dependent variables
d. reduce the time it takes to draw a sample
Determining whether a program designed to reduce burglary actually had the intended
effect is an example of _____.
a. explanation
b. evaluation
c. application
d. research
Logical sets of attributes are known as _____.
a. values
b. variables
c. concepts
d. operational definitions
An interrupted time-series design can be very useful in what type of research?
a. applied research
b. exploratory research
c. descriptive research
d. double-blind research
Which of the following is a technique that works well when interviewing subjects about
topics that may be emotionally or psychologically challenging?
a. having the researcher ask questions from behind a curtain so that the subject does not
see the interviewer
b. asking the subject to respond to questions on a laptop computer
c. putting the researcher in a disguise so that the subject does not know their identity
d. put the subject in a disguise so that they cannot be identified
What are the four purposes of research?
a. exploration, description, explanation, application
b. exploration, description, funding, application
c. exploration, development, inquisition, funding
d. exploration, development, inquisition, application
In Widom’s study of the effects of child abuse and its impact upon later criminal
offenses, she selected a sample of children with court records of being abuse victims
and gathered a comparison group that were matched on gender, race, age and
socioeconomic status. The technique used in this case was
____________________________.
a. individual matching
b. aggregate matching
c. randomization
d. creaming
Treatment integrity is _____.
a. roughly equivalent to reliability
b. roughly equivalent to validity
c. the difference between the experimental intervention is delivered as intended
d. both reliable and valid
Qualitative field research compared to surveys ___________________________.
a. is easier to conduct
b. is more reliable
c. is stronger on validity but weaker on reliability
d. is less expensive
Policy analysis is used to _____.
a. help design alternative courses of action
b. select a policy
c. seek explanations
d. select right employees
Which of the following is not an example of nonpublic agency records?
a. the FBI’s publication of the Uniform Crime Reports
b. information from a local police department concerning the number of crimes that
happened within the past month
c. a prison’s collection of files dealing with inmates currently in their custody
d. a county courthouse’s records on defendants tried within the last six months
Generally speaking, secondary data are least useful when the purpose of research is
______________.
Field research interviews use less structured methods known by Patton as
____________.
When a researcher asks respondents for a single answer to a combination question, their
question is said to be ______________.
A good way to avoid sampling bias in the assessment of public opinion about a specific
criminal justice topic is to employ the use of a radio call-in show since those who call
radio talk shows represent everyone in the population.
A(n) _________________________ experiment guards against experimenters’
tendency to prejudge results by eliminating the possibility of either the researcher or the
subjects knowing which group is the control and which group is the experimental.
If you want to ask several questions that have the same set of answer categories, the
best type of question to use is the ________________.
Grounded theory is not built from qualitative field observations.
Making observations in a more deliberate way helps to reduce error.
Agency records, secondary data and content analysis do not require direct interaction
with research subjects.
According to the _______, a consistent run of good or bad luck is presumed to
foreshadow its opposite.
Conceptualization is the process by which we specify precisely what we mean when we
use particular terms.
In evaluation studies, the group to whom the program is appropriate is referred to as the
program’s _______________________ population.
A form of “pre-evaluation” called a(n) _______________________ is designed to allow
the researcher to determine whether conditions necessary for conducting an evaluation
are present.
A(n) ______________________ is an action taken for the purpose of producing some
intended result.
Univariate analysis and subgroup comparisons focus on describing variables while
bivariate analysis focuses upon people.
Examples of longitudinal studies include: Trend, Panel, and ________________.
Research involving observations of subjects involved in criminal activities may expose
the researcher to ____________________.
The two main ways of promoting compliance with ethical principles are
__________________ and ___________________.