CJ 310: Research Methods: E-Books

The main objective of this book is to propose an alternative criminal opportunity theory. The authors build upon social control and routine activities to develop a dynamic, multi-contextual criminal opportunity theory. Emphasizing the importance of contextual explanations of criminal acts, they propose two levels of analysis: individual and environmental.

Considering sentencing under persistent offender laws, Rodriguez examines the correlations between sentence and race and ethnicity. Her study uses sentencing data on repeat and third-strike offenders in Washington state to assess the effect of legal and extralegal variables on sentencing outcomes and the pattern of offenses committed. In addition, interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys throughout the state provide contextual information on the impacts of the law. Rodriguez finds that racial disparity is confined to specific offense types and mitigated by other legal variables.

In this book, renowned profiler Dr. Richard Kocsis presents a distinct approach to profiling called Crime Action Profiling or CAP. The volume explains the scope and methodology employed in the studies that the author has undertaken over the past decade and a half. CAP adopts the view that profiling essentially represents a psychological technique that has its foundations in the disciplinary knowledge of forensic psychology.

The path-breaking Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories is an accessible, multidisciplinary insight into the complex field of feminist thought. The Encyclopedia contains over 500 authoritative entries commissioned from an international team of contributors and includes clear, concise and provocative explanations of key themes and ideas. Each entry contains cross references and a bibliographic guide to further reading; over 50 biographical entries provide readers with a sense of how the theories they encounter have developed out of the lives and situations of their authors.

This book provides a foundation for the study of child abuse to include physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect. This book describes physical and behavioral indicators of abuse, theoretical explanations of child abuse, the characteristics of abusers, and responses to child abuse by the criminal justice system.

In incorporating social process into a model of the dynamics of mental disorders, Being Mentally Ill questions the individualistic model favored in current psychiatric and psychoanalytic theory. While the conventional psychiatric viewpoint seeks the causes of mental illness, Scheff views "the symptoms of mental illness" as the violation of residual rules—social norms so taken for granted that they are not explicitly verbalized. Throughout the book, the sociological model of mental illness is compared and contrasted with more conventional medical and psychological models in an attempt to delineate significant problems for further analysis and research.