Statistics for Criminology and Criminal Justice

Ronet D. Bachman, PhD, worked as a statistician at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S.Department of Justice, before going back to an academic career; she is now a professor in theDepartment of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. She is coauthorof Statistical Methods for Criminology and Criminal Justice and coeditor of Explaining Criminalsand Crime: Essays in Contemporary Criminal Theory. In addition, she is the author of Death andViolence on the Reservation and coauthor of Stress, Culture, and Aggression; Murder AmericanStyle; and Violence: The Enduring Problem, along with numerous articles and papers that examinethe epidemiology and etiology of violence, with particular emphasis on women, the elderly,and minority populations as well as research examining desistance from crime. Her most recentfederally funded research was a mixed-methods study that examined the long-term desistancetrajectories of criminal justice involved drug-involved individuals who have been followed withboth quantitative and interview data for nearly thirty years. Her current state-funded research isassessing the needs of violent crime victims, especially those whose voices are rarely heard suchas loved ones of homicide victims. Raymond Paternoster, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. He received his B.A. in sociology at the University of Delaware where he was introduced to criminology by Frank Scarpitti and obtained his Ph.D. at Florida State University under the careful and dedicated tutelage of Gordon Waldo and Ted Chiricos. He is coauthor of The Death Penalty: America’s Experience with Capital Punishment. In addition to his interest in statistics, he also pursues questions related to offender decision making and rational choice theory, desistance from crime, and capital punishment. With funding from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), he is currently working on research comparing the decision-making patterns and characteristics of a sample of serious adult offenders and a comparable group of community members.

• Chapter 1. The Importance of Statistics in the Criminological Sciences or Why Do I have to Learn This Stuff?PART I. Univariate Analysis: Describing Variable DistributionsChapter 2. Levels of Measurement and AggregationChapter 3. Understanding Data Distributions: Tabular and Graphical TechniquesChapter 4. Measures of Central TendencyChapter 5. Measures of DispersionPART II. Making Inferences in Univariate Analysis: Generalizing From a Sample to the PopulationChapter 6. Probability, Probability Distributions, and an Introduction to Inferential TestingChapter 7. Point Estimation and Confidence IntervalsChapter 8. From Estimation to Statistical Tests: Hypothesis Testing for One Population Mean and ProportionPART III. Bivariate Analysis: Relationships Between Two VariablesChapter 9. Testing Hypotheses With Categorical DataChapter 10. Hypothesis Tests Involving Two Population Means or ProportionsChapter 11. Hypothesis Tests Involving Three or More Population Means: Analysis of VarianceChapter 12. Bivariate Correlation and RegressionPART IV. Multivariable Analysis: Predicting One Dependent Variable with Two or More Independent VariablesChapter 13. Controlling for a Third Variable: Multiple OLS RegressionChapter 14. Regression Analysis With a Dichotomous Dependent Variable: Logit Models