secondary sources and crime

secondary sources and crime

1. Ethical issues

   • the researcher could gain guilty knowledge
   • the nature of rime and affects, must be careful when using personal documents
   • criminal records, whose property are they?
   • researcher may put people in danger if using personal documents

2. Representativeness and reliability

   • can lead to inconsitencies, in the case of domestic abuse, only most serious crime is charged
   • cleaning up of young offenders crimes, too young, incomplete picture of crime
   • the CJS is more biased towards serious crimes
   • criminals leave few documents that may incriminate them, incomplete picutre
   • evidence on crime is not standardised in format, such as diaries

3. validity

   • only 60% of crimes reported, BCS
   • relationship with perpetrator can affect is they report the crime (family member)
   • victims report nearly all vehicle crime, but a minority report sexual abuse
   • official stats tilt towards perspective of enforcement agencies
   • Triangulation, Braithwaite, transcripts, repots and interviews on corperate crimes. used interviews with criminals to look at their perspective

4. practical issues

   • some crimes not reported before 1998
   • different interpretations of crime
   • some information easily accessible, others not so
   • official documents useful for developing historical perspective
   • maybe limited data available, offenders may have destroyed data

5. Media documents

   • media interpetations of crime, its nature and perpetrtors distorts the reality of crime
   • Holland's study, the media labelled the people he was researching as deviant

6. Documents can be used to study

   • Credit card fraud