Criminology journal article critical evaluation - Essay Example

Therefore, qualitative analysis will allow any researcher to document and bring out relationships between the research question and data sources , develop patterns and trends, themes and categories, which best helps a researcher to understand the data and make meanings from the trends established. This makes qualitative analysis through surveys the best research approach to employ in any social phenomena. Yang & Wayckoff (2010) in their research Perceptions of safety and victimization: does survey construction affect perceptions?

Clearly indicate the appropriateness of a survey in establishing trends, themes, and relationships between collected data sets and the subjects to better understand a social issue. The research seeks to establish whether question order in surveys involving victimization have any effect on the answers provided by respondents, in establishing the respondent’s characteristics, and question order effects in understanding the best way to arrange questions in a survey involving victims of criminology.

This study aims at establishing social relationships between crime victims and survey questions to measure how such victims would respond to questions related to victimization; this implies the research question just like any other social research questions aims at establishing patterns and trends to make a hypothesis regarding the behavior of such victims in answering survey questions. As Livesey (2006) explains, such a study would apply a positivists approach in methodology which makes it possible to establish social behavioral patterns.

Therefore, the survey methodology as used in this research is appropriate and ideal in bringing out behaviors of such crime victims in a survey. The main motivation in justifying the use of surveys in qualitative research in the study above is that such an approach will enable the researchers to develop various explanations of both social and cultural phenomena as would be observed from the data set collected (Zakaria, 2004). Such a survey would lead to a naturalistic way of exploring the data in a qualitative –descriptive approach, an approach which is ideal in understanding and interpreting data collected and observed in the best objective way possible (DeLyser, 2008).

Through such research methodology, the aims of the research which are investigating the effects of question ordering in surveys for crime victims will be effectively realized. Wilmot (2009) explains that in qualitative research, the use of non-probability approach is critical and a researcher has to have a complete sample with no statistical representative. Therefore, the best approach in such a survey would be to use purposive sampling. The characteristic of individuals have to be reflected in the selection process to reflect both diversity and breadth of any sample population.

Consequently, the researchers settled on carrying out the research in a university due to the high prevalence of victimization in universities, high rates of campus crimes, and growing concerns as a result of the high crime rates among parents (Jenning et al, 2007). Though such a sample could be considered to limit the generalization of such findings, the researchers explained that the university in which the research was carried out comprises of diverse student population with a random sample of student populatio