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1. Review the common errors of personal inquiry dis- cussed in this chapter. Searching the Internet or a newspaper, find an article about crime that illus- trates one or more

of those errors. Discuss how a social scientist would avoid making that error.

Crime, Criminal Justice, and Scientific Inquiry

2. Briefly discuss examples of descriptive research and explanatory research about crime rates in a large city near your college or university.

3.Often, things we think are true and supported by considerable experience and evidence turn out not to be true, or at least not true with the certainty we expected. Criminal justice seems especially vulner- able to this phenomenon, perhaps because crime and criminal justice policy are so often the subjects of mass and popular media attention. If news sto- ries, movies, and television shows all point to grow- ing gang or drug-related violence, it is easy to assume that these are real problems identified by system- atic study. Choose a criminal justice topic or claim thats currently prominent in news stories or enter- tainment. Using Google Scholar or some other bib- liographic tool, search the Internet for two research studies that examine the topic in systematic ways we described in this chapter. Briefly summarize the studies findings.