Maintaining Confidentiality
For each of the following questions, compose a thorough response drawing on the readings covered in the course as well as your own knowledge of methodology and criminology. In order to provide a complete answer, your response for each question should be at LEAST one paragraph (6-7 sentences). Longer submissions are welcome if appropriate and substantive. Each question is worth 1 point. 1. Choose a topic that interests you. Write a problem statement, purpose statement (using Creswell and Poths script in Chapter 6) central question and two or three sub-questions. 2. You are working for a community development organization in a city with high rates of unemployment, poverty, high school attrition, and juvenile delinquency. Your organization wants to begin an afternoon computer-training program for young people. Explain how descriptive, exploratory, explanatory, and evaluation research can all be used to help start and later maintain this program. 3. Consider the Milgram obedience studies and the Stanford prison simulation study. Discuss some of the ethical concerns regarding the treatment of participants in both studies. Do you think the benefits of the knowledge that was gained from these experiments outweighed the risks to the participants? 4. Discuss the importance of maintaining confidentiality. What can be done by all researchers to protect the confidentiality of subjects and what can researchers who focus on high-risk populations do to protect themselves? 5. List and describe 3-4 writing strategies as proposed by Creswell (2014). Explain how you can use these elements to write your final paper for this course. 6. What are the similarities and differences among the five approaches in qualitative research? 7. What are the observation roles available to a field researcher? List and describe each role. Assume you were interested in studying social protest and movements in the US. Which of the observer roles would you choose to study Black Lives Matter occurring across the US and why? 8. Crime has been decreasing in most U.S. cities for the last decade. However, crime remains a critical issue in politics, in the media, and in explanations for why middle-class people do not want to live in the cities. Explain this situation by referring to all four errors in everyday reasoning. Propose different sources of errors in everyday reasoning that might account for continued concern about crime even in the face of evidence of declining crime rates. 9. According to Pont (2008), describe some of the ethical issues surrounding research that involves incarcerated persons. In the era of COVID-19, do you see their being greater concerns for this population? Explain why or why not. 10. Among the five research approaches, which approach would you be hypothetically interested in using as a researcher? Provide insights as to the definition, one example of a topic you would study and why?
