18 Jan DQ2 Real-World Complications

JADM350 Research Methods in Criminal Justice

Week 4 Discussion

DQ1 Deciding How to Research

You are the Shift Lt. in charge of a DUI task force for your small department. This is a very specialized and expensive component of your department’s efforts to reduce driving under the influence of either drugs or alcohol, and you have been told to research the success of your task force for the past 6 months and to present these findings to the Chief and Deputy Chief at the next Command Briefing scheduled for this coming Friday. Your task force consists of 12 mobile units, each with an officer having specialized training, two K9 units, and the 6-month span from June 1 through 12/31 of this past year. To research this, you will have to resort to sorting through the tickets written during that time frame for details and you can use daily/weekly/monthly staff reports for overall statistics.

You must post at least three times each week. Explain your experiment by day 3 (your main posting) of this class week. Then on day 4, you will go to any fellow class student and critique their experiment on the grounds of internal and external validity, while suggesting ways to improve the design and validity of their experiment. Last, your third posting (you are welcome to post more) will be in response to the critique made of your initial posting by the classmate who is immediately before you in the alphabet.

DQ2 Real-World Complications

Given the sample in topic 1, what real-world complications could you see in being able to perform the DUI research listed above, and as that Shift Lieutenant, what systems or procedures would you implement to ensure your follow-up report was more accurately and meaningfully created? To validate your conclusion about real-world complications, you might want to do a quick library search to locate studies done concerning DUI research. What complications did those researchers discuss?

DISCUSSION REQUIREMENTS:

You are expected to log in and participate in the discussion activities at least every other day, which is necessary if you are to meaningfully interact on discussion issues presented in class. This “every other day” requirement may be appropriately interpreted as 3 days per week.

You are expected to “fully participate” in the discussion. This means that, in addition to posting a response to the topics presented, you are expected to respond to comments from your fellow students, and questions from me.