Question

When you have occasion to read a report or article related to law enforcement or criminal justice, do you focus solely on the author’s interpretation and prose related to the study, or do you read the underlying study and data results to interpret the study results for yourself?

Answer 1

Answer.

Law and crime are more often the reflections of social and political developments. By this virtue, studies in criminology may run the potential risk of presenting a legal issue based on the moral judgements of the authors themselves rather than the larger social reality. The authors generally favor a long chronological perspective with a comparative international focus over geographical scope, and short term analysis. It is then likely that the author’s own interpretive framework may influence the ethical analysis of a legal judgement and therefore a critical readership would require going beyond the researchers interpretations and words and analyse and understand the data for oneself.