CHAPTER 1: THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND CRIMINOLOGY AS SOCIAL SCIENCES
1. To avoid being overly wordy, most references to criminal justice and criminology throughout this text simply identify criminal justice. The exceptions are when a specific distinction needs to be made between these obviously closely related disciplines.
2. Names and dates appear throughout this text to offer documentation for points that are being made. This is a common practice in scientific writing, the details for which are described in chapter 5. For testing purposes, students need not know the names of any persons cited within parentheses (unless your instructor states otherwise). The only names that will appear on examination questions are those that are specifically mentioned outside parentheses.
CHAPTER 3: UNIVARIATE STATISTICS AND THE CONCEPT OF STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE
1. Regarding formal attire ratings, the top 16 percent of the ratings begin around forty-three. The bottom 16 percent of the ratings begin at thirty.
2. In the context of the article, ‘‘t = 2.982, p < .0032’’ is interpreted as very significant (with only about 3/1,000 of a chance of having occurred by chance). Therefore, one can confidently conclude that high school students believe that their fellow students assign modestly higher levels of ‘‘respect scores’’ to male teachers who are more formally dressed (dress shirt and tie) than more casually dressed (jeans and a T-shirt).
3. Two concepts that are closely related to that of statistical significance are effect size and statistical power. The first of these is discussed in chapter 11 as part of a broader discussion of meta-analysis. Statistical power is dealt with in chapter 7 when dealing with issues surrounding sample size.
CHAPTER 4: BIVARIATE AND MULTIVARIATE STATISTICS
1. Answers to the question pertaining to figure 4.9:
1. Which state has the highest property crime rate? Ans. Florida.
2. Which state had the lowest? Ans. Wyoming.
3. Which state had the greatest degree of income inequality? Ans. Connecticut.
4. Which state had the least? Ans. South Dakota.
5. What do you think the correlation is between these two variables? Ans. r = + .49.
CHAPTER 7: SURVEYING AND SAMPLING
1. Technically, a distinction can be made between a population and a universe, with the latter being a more inclusive term. Specifically, a population refers to a collection of humans (or other living things), whereas a universe includes populations, but also refers to collections of characteristics (or numbers representing those characteristics) exhibited by members of a population.
2. In precise statistical terms, the error percentages presented in table 7.1 actually represent 95 percent confidence limits. This means that one time out of twenty, the actual percentages might exceed the confidence limits.
CHAPTER 17: EVALUATION AND OTHER APPLIED RESEARCH
1. Several programs very similar to Scared Straight have been developed. The best known of these are Juvenile Offenders Learn Truth (JOLT) (Homant & Osowski, 1982, 57; Yarborough, 1979), Face-to-Face (Vreeland, 1981), and Stay Straight (Buckner & Chesney-Lind, 1983). For the present discussion, research on the effects of these programs are dealt with under the name Scared Straight.