Discussion 12

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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 determine causality.

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 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.

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 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

Ethics and Challenges

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 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?

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

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 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 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?

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 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.

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Ethics and Challenges

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