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Purpose Of Research In Criminal Justice

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When thinking about Criminal Justice it’s obvious that research is involved in solving crime. But it goes much further than that. Research is actually conducted in Criminal Justice itself. Research is done in Criminal Justice for a number of reasons. Research can be conducted in Criminal Justice for three main reasons; social problems, policy and academics. Then a number of other additional reasons are exploration, description, explanation, application, predictive and finally intervening. Within why research is conducted is another important aspect of Criminal Justice is Methodology; which is how the research is being conducted. Each of these topics will further be explained in depth.
Research is important in every field but especially in …show more content…

Academics can be used in two different ways here; learning to help criminal justice professionals and providing information for students. Just like our textbook, criminal justice research can be done for academic purposes to teach all aspects of Criminal Justice. Criminal Justice classes range from high school to graduate school, that means there needs to be academic resources for all those years’ worth of learning and teaching. But it can also be to learn more about the Criminal Justice system as a whole for those who are working in it. For example, research may be done to learn why adolescences are behaving the way they are. Then social service personnel can read and learn from this research to further help …show more content…

Explanatory research is done to explain why things are happening. This is very important in the Criminal Justice field because if it’s impossible to understand why someone is doing something, it will be very difficult to stop it. This is very relevant to researching because of social problems. By understanding and explaining social problems perhaps they can be prevented in the future. An example of explanatory research from Dantzker and Hunter’s book is why particular people become serial killers. (2016) Gathering this important research that gives answers can help find ways to stop or try to prevent it. The methodology of explanatory research would be researching and gathering evidence then further analyzing that evidence as to why a specific event or issue occurs in Criminal Justice. Explanatory research is a very important part of all Criminal Justice research conducted, because if it’s not understood why something is happening there is a very small chance that it’s possible to come up with a way to stop

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