Tag Archives: Crime

Proposal Example #1 (Environmental Factors and Crime)

Odd research, ,

Ying, Crystal Loh Wai (1996). The Relationship between Juvenile Delinquency and Environmental Variables in New Town, Tuen Mun.

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This research proposal dealt with the different environments in which crime takes place. This is a proposed study that is going to be specifically looking at the new town of Tuen Mun in Hong Kong. This particular town has high crime rates compared to other urban towns in Hong Kong and Ying (1996) wants to find out why. Ying decided to analyze this area for information about the type of environment it is in order to see if there is anything relating the abnormally high crime rates to how the town is set up.

The literature review that Ying did found that there is more crime rates around areas that have a high amount of access to the public. Crime rates were also found to be correlated with things like  housing conditions, demographic stability and ethnic/social status.

In order to do this study, Ying proposed to hang out with a group juvenile delinquents and seeing what they do. The researcher seems to want to find one juvenile delinquent and get them to  snowball sample in order to get a few people to watch the behaviors of.

Ying also hopes to interview these juvenile delinquents to see why they make the decision to commit crimes in certain areas. In addition to getting interview information from the juvenile delinquents,  Ying hopes to interview police officers and security guards to see what areas they believe are high crime and why.

Ying has the proposed project to find out why the town of Tuen Mun in Hong Kong has high crime rates as compared to other Hong Kong cities. The researcher has a few ideas from past research, saying that environmental factors are often an issue correlated with crime rates. To figure out the exact reason why crime is so high in this particular city, Ying will observe and interview juvenile delinquents.  Ying also proposes to interview security guards and police officers to get a full picture on the areas where there is an abundance of crime.

Journal Exercise #2 (Crime in Non-Western Religion)

Research I might use for my project, ,

The article “Does religion suppress, socialize, soothe, or support? Exploring religiosity’s influence on crime” from the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion was by Brauer, Tittle, and Antonaccio.

This article was trying to find if religiosity had negative correlations with crime in the non-Western world. According to other research, there is a negative association between religiosity and crime in Western contexts, but these researchers wanted to try and figure out if the same was true in a non-Western context. More specifically, Brauer, Tittle, and Antonaccio explored whether crime and religion were related in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Lviv, Ukraine.

The research question gives us what type of data will be collected. They wanted to know, specifically, if religious people in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Lviv, Ukraine would report less likely to commit a crime as opposed to the non-religious people living there.

In addition to finding out if crime and religion had a negative correlation, the researchers wanted to explore whether religiosity is coupled with things such as self-control, social control, moral beliefs, negative emotions, and social support.

The researchers used surveys to ask the people in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Lviv, Ukraine if they feel likely to commit a crime in the future and whether they are religious or not. The researchers surveyed a random sample of both populations in order to get results that accurately reflected the entire populations. The type of data collected was reports of acts, behaviors, or events since the surveyed people are reporting how likely it is for them to commit a crime in the future.

The data from these surveys were then analyzed using a correlation matrix and then a multivariable OLS regression analysis because the data was ordinal and quantitative.

The results confirmed that religiosity and crime is negatively correlated in the non-Western world. They also found that religion influenced social networks and thus also had an influence on crime in that manner.

I honestly get a little bit lost with all the explanations on how the researchers figured out their results, but there did seem to be a negative correlation between crime and religion according to their data. This also corresponded with results from other research done in the United States, but the point of this research was that it might be more of a cultural thing than the actual religion of people in different areas. It is very interesting that religiosity is negatively correlated to crime not just in the Western world but all over, so far at least.

One thing I would wonder about was their use of surveys. They used a survey to see how people described how likely they were to commit certain crimes in the future, which would not have been a method I might have thought of using because people could lie about what they would do.

Brauer, Tittle, and Antonaccio explored whether crime and religion were related in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Lviv, Ukraine in order to get a non-Western view on whether crime and religiosity is related. They used surveys to get people to report whether they were likely to commit a crime in the future and whether they were religious. Brauer, Tittle, and Antonaccio then analyzed this data to find a negative correlation between religiosity and crime in the non-Western world. Surveys may not be the best method to get accurate data, but it was a good way to get a lot of results that could be analyzed semi-quickly.