Quantitative Research Project
Introduction
When considering the characteristics of the crime as relatively independent phenomena one can understand this phenomenon as socially dangerous one. At the same time, crime is only an element of the public events. Existing and functioning in society, it permeates all different areas and various public attitudes. From this perspective, crime is a social phenomenon, which could be discussed qualitatively. Consequently, this assignment is aimed at analysis of the teaching dataset of British Crime Survey 2007-2008.
Literature Review
Crime is a social phenomenon, which is not only ontological, but epistemological. It generated all of the conditions of social life. This thesis at first glance does not seem certain, especially because of the fact there are a lot of crime theories. One of them claims that the level of the crime is associated with primary socialization. Indeed, “Failed socialization can be accepted as a kind of socialization with norms and behaviors that are not accepted by society in general. Children can learn criminal behavior by interaction with intimate people” (Sahin, 2014).
Several geneticists and criminologists emphasized the necessity of taking into account new scientific achievements of genetics, including a number of innate characteristics of people who almost certainly determine their behavior, including socially dangerous. One theory claims that the ability to commit a crime is genetically based. This theory emphasizes that people are not becoming the criminals, they are born as criminals. This tendency has been tried to prove by a large team of geneticists from Europe and the United States. They found genetic background of people who contribute to the commission of crimes of various kinds of gravity. It turns out that genes influence the complex biochemistry of the brain, causing the person to transgress the law. “Although genetic explanations for criminal behaviour have been circulated since the emergence of modern criminology in the 1700s, until recently, there has not been the scientific evidence to substantiate or refute any claims” (Morley and Hall, 2003).
Overall, any theory will admit that the crime is a deviation, where the latter is represented as “a violation of norms or rules of behavior that are typically outside of the norms” (Hammond and Thompson, 2005).If human behavior is clearly defined as a deviation from established norms or is unpredictable (which is negative fact), and it is determined by birth or acquired physiological characteristics, it is impossible to believe that this individual can control one’s own actions and is aware of those actions.
Consequently, it is fair to claim, that the database chosen for this research paper is perfect for this assignment. The main themes covered in British Crime Survey include “experience of crime, perceptions of crime, characteristics of local area, attitudes to police and Criminal Justice System and socio-demographics” (Discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk, 2008). All of those indicators are essential for analysis the nature of crime. Understanding those categories will help to prevent the increase of criminal attacks.
Method and Methodology
For this research paper it was decided to download the British Crime Survey 2007-2008 and to analyze it via SPSS software. The data is numerical, which makes it possible to provide statistical hypothesis and to conduct a quantitative analysis of particular variables. This method is indeed useful, since “the main beneficial aspect is that it provides the means to separate out the large number of confounding factors that often obscure the main qualitative findings” (Abeyasekera, 2013). By studying the quantitative determination of social phenomena and processes, one has to deal with the use of specific tools and techniques. Those methods include observation (unincorporated and incorporated), the surveying (interviews, questionnaire and surveying), document analysis (quantitative) and experiment (controlled and uncontrolled). In this case, the method used is questionnaire.
Results
In the process of the analysis, there were several hypotheses.
Hypothesis #1. Feeling safety is gender based.
For this hypothesis there were used such indicators as ‘feeling safe, when walking home alone during the daytime’, ‘feeling safe, when walking home alone during the nighttime’ and ‘feeling safe, when being home alone’.
Step 1. Firstly, it was conducted the descriptive statistics analysis, by using the following code for crosstabs:
CROSSTABS
/TABLES=walkdark walkday homealon BY sex
/FORMAT=AVALUE TABLES
/CELLS=COUNT ROW COLUMN
/COUNT ROUND CELL.
Step 2. Analyzing these results is not actually comfortable, since the results are introduced in three separate tables. As an example, there are the bar charts below (Fig.1-3), where one could notice the tendency, that this hypothesis is not adequate enough.
Since those three tables are separate, as it was said, it is pretty tough to accept the hypothesis. With this purpose, it is essential to recode the variables, in order to make the analysis relevant.
Step 4. Recoding three variables into one general. This is possible by using the synthax and putting the following code:
COMPUTE safe1=MEAN(walkdark,walkday,homealon) .
EXECUTE.
The bar chart, represented below, approves the fact that feeling safe is gender based, since males are feeling more self confident and safe, when females are supposed to have more fears, rather than males (Fig. 4).
Hypothesis #2: The crime level depends on the type of the area (rural or urban)
Step 1. Apparently, there were two indicators used in this task. Those are the type of the area and whether one became a witness of a crime during past 12 months.
Step 2. There was used crosstab analysis, using the following code:
CROSSTABS
/TABLES=bcsvictim BY rural2
/FORMAT=AVALUE TABLES
/CELLS=COUNT ROW COLUMN
/COUNT ROUND CELL
/BARCHART.
Step 3. There were received the following results (Fig.5)
Eventually, the bigger amount of people lives in urban areas, so it is irrelevant to look at row percentage. Hence, column percentage is more valid. Indeed, 86% of village people did not became as witnesses of a crime, when in the city 77% did not experience any crimes. The differences is about 10%, in order to approve the hypothesis, it is essential to take further steps.
Step 4. Using the Person’s correlation.
Interpretation of r is pretty simple. “When r is close to 0, either on the positive or the negative side, then there is little or no association between X and Y” (Wheeler, 1979). In this case, correlation is -0,092, which is not significant enough in order to accept the hypothesis. Hence, the possibility of having a crime experience does not depend on the type of the area.
Hypothesis #3. The possibility of having a crime experience depends on the gender.
In this case, we are going to repeat the step 4 of the second hypothesis, by using the following code:
CORRELATIONS
/VARIABLES=bcsvictim sex
/PRINT=TWOTAIL NOSIG
/MISSING=PAIRWISE.
The following results were received (Fig.7)
The chi square coefficient is only -0.003, which absolutely insufficient in order to approve the hypothesis. In particular, people are not tended to have an experience in crimes, does not matter what their gender is (Fig 8).
Discussion
Crime is not just a social phenomenon; it is a social and psychological issue. The social nature of crime is indeed complicated. Previously presented definition does not answer the question, because the crime is an empirical concept, even though this deviation is discussed theoretically in various works. Crimes have their own distinctive features, based on their power. The most complicated crimes are eventually the crimes against the humanity, and those are hard to analyze. “The point comes out most plainly when we consider the first item in our catalogue of legal features of crimes against humanity: crimes against humanity are inflicted on victims based on their membership in a population rather than their individual characteristics” (Luban, 2010). Variants of such empirical concepts taught in many textbooks, associated with criminology and other works.
Conclusions
This research paper was aimed at the analysis of general crimes and their nature, based on questionnaire. This gave one an opportunity to learn an epistemological context of crimes and to find some tendencies. It turned out to be that it is essential to study this issue more deeply, probably by using factor or regression analysis, because mostly all of the hypotheses are not clear enough.
References
Abeyasekera, S. (2013). QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS APPROACHES TO
QUALITATIVE DATA: WHY, WHEN AND HOW. Statistical Services Centre.
Gender and Crime in Historical Perspective. (2009). Crime, Histoire et Sociétés, 6(1),
pp.147-148.
Greenwood, P. and Nikulin, M. (1996). A guide to chi-squared testing. New York: Wiley.
Hammond, R. and Thompson, W. (2005). Study guide for Thompson and Hickey, Society in
focus, an introduction to sociology, 5th ed.. Boston: Pearson, Allyn and Bacon.
Luban, D. (2010). A Theory of Crimes Against Humanity. Georgetown University Law
Center, pp.85-167.
Morley, K. and Hall, W. (2003). Is There a Genetic Susceptibility to Engage in Criminal
Acts?. Australian Institute of Criminology: Issues and Trends in crime and criminal justice, [online] 263. Available at: http://www.aic.gov.au/media_library/publications/tandi_pdf/tandi263.pdf [Accessed 7 Aug. 2016].
Sahin, H. (2014). The relationship between education and crime: Crime as a social
phenomenon that can be learned in children and adolescents. European Journal of Research on Social Studies, [online] 1(1), pp.8-12. Available at: http://iassr2.org/rs/E010302.pdf [Accessed 7 Aug. 2016].
Silvestri, M. and Crowther-Dowey, C. (2008). Gender & crime. Los Angeles: SAGE.
Discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk. (2008). UK Data Service Discover » British Crime Survey
2007-2008: Unrestricted Access Teaching Dataset. [online] Available at: https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=6891 [Accessed 7 Aug. 2016].
Wheeler, P. (1979). Measuring association between dichotomous variables. [Dunedin]:
