Ethics and Challenges Ethics and Challenges Program Transcript NARRATOR: Conducting research in criminal behavior can bring unexpected challenges. Listen now Dr.'s Duncan and Kubrin discuss challenges related to conducting research in criminal behavior SCOTT DUNCAN: Dr. Kubrin, our interest in criminal behavior is very similar, but yet you and I work in very different, I suspect in many ways, very different environments, with different challenges, particularly in the area of doing research. I was wondering in your world, in the academia setting, what are some of the challenges that you faced over the years in doing research on criminal behavior? CHARIS KUBRIN: Research for academicians is really the bread and butter of what we do. And we are expected to publish frequently, publish throughout our career, collect our own data, use existing data sources, whatever we can to study crime. And then with the ultimate goal of publishing that material, whether it's in a peer reviewed journal, or a book, or even out in the public through op-eds and other sources. So really conducting our own research, publishing our own findings in journals and other sources is really the bread and butter of what we do a sociologists. That said, there are some important challenges that we face as sociologists in conducting our research. One of them has to do with the testing of sociological theories. We have these wonderful sociological theories that have developed over time, some of the newer and some of them older. And they're just that, theories. They need to get tested in order to understand better criminality. The problem is, or the challenges is, how to go about properly testing these theories. If I were to find lack of support for a theory in my particular study, one immediate question I would ask is, is the theory wrong, or have I gone about testing the theory in a wrong way? Is it an issue of theory on the one hand in faulty theory, faulty ideas, or the implementation of the study to test that theory. So there's always a tension between theory and methods for sociologists. One other challenging issue that we face has to do with dealing with issues of correlation and causation in our studies. I'm sure you've dealt with some of these issues in your own practice and that sort of thing. But for sociologists, it's not just enough to say the two things are correlated, or associated, for example poverty and crime. We want to know, does poverty cause crime? And it's much easier to show or to prove a correlation between two things, than to prove that one causes the other. Because we can find instances of individuals who are living in poverty that don't commit crime, and we can also think of individuals who are wealthy that commit crime. We can think of poor areas where crime rates are high, but also middle class areas where crime rates are high. So while the two may be correlated in our studies, it's often another issue to d.

1. Ethics and Challenges
Ethics and Challenges
Program Transcript
NARRATOR: Conducting research in criminal behavior can
bring unexpected
challenges. Listen now Dr.'s Duncan and Kubrin discuss
challenges related to
conducting research in criminal behavior

2. SCOTT DUNCAN: Dr. Kubrin, our interest in criminal behavior
is very similar, but
yet you and I work in very different, I suspect in many ways,
very different
environments, with different challenges, particularly in the area
of doing research.
I was wondering in your world, in the academia setting, what
are some of the
challenges that you faced over the years in doing research on
criminal behavior?
CHARIS KUBRIN: Research for academicians is really the
bread and butter of
what we do. And we are expected to publish frequently, publish
throughout our
career, collect our own data, use existing data sources, whatever
we can to study
crime. And then with the ultimate goal of publishing that
material, whether it's in a
peer reviewed journal, or a book, or even out in the public
through op-eds and
other sources. So really conducting our own research,
publishing our own
findings in journals and other sources is really the bread and
butter of what we do
a sociologists. That said, there are some important challenges
that we face as
sociologists in conducting our research.
One of them has to do with the testing of sociological theories.
We have these
wonderful sociological theories that have developed over time,
some of the
newer and some of them older. And they're just that, theories.
They need to get

3. tested in order to understand better criminality. The problem is,
or the challenges
is, how to go about properly testing these theories.
If I were to find lack of support for a theory in my particular
study, one immediate
question I would ask is, is the theory wrong, or have I gone
about testing the
theory in a wrong way? Is it an issue of theory on the one hand
in faulty theory,
faulty ideas, or the implementation of the study to test that
theory. So there's
always a tension between theory and methods for sociologists.
One other
challenging issue that we face has to do with dealing with issues
of correlation
and causation in our studies. I'm sure you've dealt with some of
these issues in
your own practice and that sort of thing. But for sociologists,
it's not just enough
to say the two things are correlated, or associated, for example
poverty and
crime. We want to know, does poverty cause crime? And it's
much easier to
show or to prove a correlation between two things, than to
prove that one causes
the other. Because we can find instances of individuals who are
living in poverty
that don't commit crime, and we can also think of individuals
who are wealthy that
commit crime. We can think of poor areas where crime rates are
high, but also
middle class areas where crime rates are high. So while the two
may be
correlated in our studies, it's often another issue to determine
causality.

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Ethics and Challenges
Just one quick example of this that I like to use with students to
get this idea
across is there's the famous correlation between ice cream sales
and homicide.
You've probably heard of this one, where we know that there's a

5. correlation
between ice cream sales, as ice cream sales go up, dollars spent
on ice cream
go up, homicides go up. And so the question is, well that's a
nice correlation, but
does eating ice cream actually cause people to commit
homicide? And of course
we come in as professors and explain that there's a third factor
which has to do
with weather that is correlated with both of those factors, which
in effect accounts
for that correlation. So as the weather it goes up, as the
temperatures rise, ice
cream sales go up, as do homicides because more people
interact in space.
So determining and differentiating correlation and causation is a
very challenging
task for sociological researchers.
SCOTT DUNCAN: Do you face challenges as a researcher in
coming up with
data to research? Particularly in the area of criminal behavior.
Is it difficult for you
to actually find the data?
CHARIS KUBRIN: Us sociologists are very jealous of you
clinicians, because you
have access to the populations we'd love to get access to. We do
not have ready
access to inmates, juvenile delinquents, criminals.
Unfortunately, none of them
are knocking or beating down our doors to provide us with data.
So essentially,
sociologists typically use data on crime from three sources.

6. We use official data which is the Uniform Crime report data
published by the FBI
annually. We also conduct a lot of self report surveys. So we go
out into the
population as researchers, ask people to fill out extensive
surveys where they
report their criminality or delinquency, and look for patterns in
the data. And then
the third most common form of data that we use is
Victimization Survey data.
And lots of government agencies collect data on who gets
victimized, and what
are the experiences of victimization that have happened.
As you can imagine, each data source provides a slightly
different picture on
crime. Most crime goes unreported, so the data that we get from
official crime
statistics leave out some important categories of crime like drug
use and
prostitution and that sort of thing. On the other hand, people
don't always report
victimization, so using the victimization data provides another
slice. But I would
imagine having access to individuals in prison provides you
with unbelievable
data opportunities and data collection opportunities.
SCOTT DUNCAN: Well I know for myself, and I suspect that
this is true with
most clinicians, they perhaps are intimidated by the research
component, in that
they'll tell themselves, well I don't know that much about
statistics, or I don't know
that much about research design. So they may have an initial
interest in it, but

7. don't go any further. If clinicians were able to overcome that
and say, collect
information along the way, that they could do what I've been
fortunate enough to
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Ethics and Challenges

8. do, is to pair up with academicians that know how to do the
research design, that
know more about the research design, that know more about
statistics and how
to actually conduct the research. And the two work hand in hand
to be able to
publish information. Would it be fair to say that there would be
a fair number of
academicians out there that would love that kind of partnership?
CHARIS KUBRIN: Oh absolutely. Me personally, I would love
the opportunity to
work with someone who's had first hand experience dealing
with criminals. I
mean, this is another drawback being a sociologist and
researcher at a
university. I study these issues, but we don't always have direct
access to the
populations we're studying. And so some students can often
question, well how
do you know anything about crime when you're not engaged at
ground level with
criminals? But, and on the other hand, we do have theories that
guide our
understanding of criminal behavior. And we do have appropriate
tests and
statistics to be able to analyze the data in a way that is rigorous,
that addresses
problems perhaps with faulty logic, or perceptions about
criminals. That those
methods, if they weren't there, would perhaps produce
erroneous results.
SCOTT DUNCAN: In a perfect world, we were to have the
clinicians to overcome
their perhaps insecurities of doing research, and collecting data

9. that more
knowledgeable people in the area of research design and
statistics could analyse
the data and we had the working together, how would you see
that potentially
changing things in society at large?
CHARIS KUBRIN: Well I think beyond just the data
availability issues on the one
hand from the perspective of sociologists, and the
methodological expertise on
the other side, bringing people, clinicians and researchers,
together produces a
diversity of perspectives on criminality. By function of our
positions, and what we
do, we've come to develop different perspectives on what causes
crime. Insights
that are unique to our fields, and the way that we go about
studying these issues.
And so I think in addition to simply freeing up data and
methods for the other to
benefit, I think bringing both sides together allows us to have a
more
comprehensive, more realistic, theoretical and applied approach
to the study of
criminality. And I think that's what's missing in a lot of cases.
SCOTT DUNCAN: One of the areas that we haven't talked
about yet was the
area of ethics. And to a certain degree the area that ethics play
in doing research
in the area of criminal justice, in the area of criminal behavior.
What types of
issues do you find yourself challenged with as far as the area of
ethics go in
doing research?

10. CHARIS KUBRIN: Ethics is an unbelievably important issue
right now in
sociological research on crime. I mean it is at the forefront.
Experiments that
were done in the 1950s and '60s, where individuals were you
quote unquote
tricked into not knowing what was going on in making these
decisions and
affecting others. Those days are long gone in the field of
sociology. We are very
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11. Ethics and Challenges
tightly regulated by the university and the federal government
in terms of how we
treat human subjects. There's lots and lots of rules and
regulations, primarily to
protect the rights of these individuals that are in some cases
problem
populations, or very difficult populations. If we wanted to
conduct a study for
example of juvenile delinquents, and speak with them about
their experiences
and this sort of thing. Well many of these youths are minors,
and it has been
decided that we must gain consent from the parents. It's an
ethical issue as to
whether you can engage a youth in your research without the
parent's consent.
And so we deal with lots of ethical issues in terms of what we
are allowed to do in
conducting research, the scope of our research, as well as the
kinds of things
we're allowed to ask our subjects. So there's lots of sensitive
information,
perhaps about victimization experiences, speaking with women
who have been
victims of rape.
So the universities have what are referred to as institutional
review boards,
where every single research project that bears the university's
name must be
approved by IRB, by the board. And it is a very lengthy, long
term, detailed

12. process-- for good reasons-- the goal is to deal with these
ethical issues and
minimize the risks to our subjects.
SCOTT DUNCAN: But as you make a very good point, the
historical problems in
doing research, we have an ethical obligation to the individuals
that we collected
data from, to those subjects that are being researched, so that no
harm comes to
them, in an effort to understand more about criminal behavior
so that we can
apply it down the road to making laws just generally helping
society in general.
CHARIS KUBRIN: Yeah, one thing I'd like to say on top of that
is that this really
becomes an issue for sociologists when we're studying certain
crimes, or certain
types of victims. For example, sociologists often want to get
detailed information
on drug dealers and sellers. And trying to give surveys to drug
dealers to fill out,
to report on their criminal activity, is not the best way to go
about that for obvious
reasons. And so often what we do as sociologist is go under
cover. And perhaps
join drug subcultures and follow these individuals in their
career paths and that
sort of thing, without their knowledge of it. Because obviously
drug dealers, as
one example, are going to be reluctant to allow a researcher in
to collect data on
them. And so another ethical issue that we have that kind of
builds on what you
were saying is that for some populations, whether you're talking

13. about drug
dealers or prostitutes for example, getting access to these
populations-- forget
the government, or forget the IRB process-- but simply getting
access to these
populations to study them in a meaningful way, from their
perspective, from their
point of view, involves some ethical issues of deceit. And so at
issue is, to what
extent are we expected to reveal ourselves to our subjects? To
what extent
should our subjects know that they are being part of a study? Do
we need to get
the consent of these participants?
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14. Ethics and Challenges
SCOTT DUNCAN: Dr. Kubrin, one of the things that I would
like to see, given my
career, and I would like to pass a long to students who are
perhaps starting their
careers in the area of forensic psychology, is I would like them
to recognize that
although they may take on the role as a clinician, that it's
important for them to
understand the research aspect of it, and explore that. I was
wondering your final
comments on that, and what you might say to a student starting
out potentially as
a clinician, to encourage them to be able to collaborate with
researchers.
CHARIS KUBRIN: Well I think collaboration is not just a good
thing, but is
actually necessary in the future really. Because if the one thing
we can agree on,
regardless of what field we are, if you study crime, you know
that it's a
ridiculously complex thing. We do not work under a hood in the
laboratory setting
where we can isolate this aspect or isolate that aspect, and add a
potion and see
what happens. Human beings are unbelievably complex in their

15. behavior. And
this is no less true for our criminal behavior. And so we can
theorize all we want,
but if we don't get out there and work on the ground collecting
data and
conducting research to understand and test those theories, we're
going to get.
And the best way to do that is to bring researchers and
clinicians, practitions, and
sociologists, and psychologists, and economists, and I can go on
and. But really,
to bring them all together, and see how we can collectively
address the causes of
crime.
SCOTT DUNCAN: Thank you, Dr. Kubrin for joining me today.
It's been a great
dialogue, and I appreciate your insights.
CHARIS KUBRIN: Thank you for having me.
Ethics and Challenges
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Ethics and Challenges
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