CRCJ 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Motor Vehicle Theft

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Course: CRCJ 1000
• Professor: Erin Mc Cuaig

Document Summary

Controversies over counting crime: methodology: refers to the study or critique of methods, reliability: identifies one of the standards against which the tools used to measure concepts are judged. Police officers have to use their discretion in what they decide to record and how they record it. Statistics on the criminal justice system: administrative records: a collection of information about individual cases. Example: city level, provincial, or national data: defenitions, data element: specification about what, exactly is going to be collected, counting procedures: a consensus on how to count units and data elements. Levels of aggregation: consensus about how to combine data: decision needs to be made about what level at which we want our statistics, example: police records for a city, an entire province, or region or the nation. Data elements: consensus about what specific information should be collected. It is extremely difficult to build aggregated statistics out of different types of records that may be incompatible.