There will be six graded class discussions. You will be required to answer FOUR essay questions based on the assigned readings. In addition, you will be required to comment on four of the questions/answers posted by your classmates. Grading will be based on the quality and clarity of the questions/posts, grammar/punctuation, proper citing and organization of answers. Answers should be no less than a paragraph in length (5-8 sentences) and must be cited in APA. Make sure to cite empirical sources.All questions and posts will be due by 11:59 pm on the due date. Please be considerate and complete in a timely manner as others depend on you to complete their work.
Discuss one of the following statements in terms of what you have learned about the criteria of causation and threats to the validity of causal inference. What cause-and-effect relationships are implied? What are some alternative explanations?
Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.
Capital punishment prevents murder.
Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to the use of other drugs.
2. Several times, the relationship between drug use and crime has been discussed. Describe the conditions that would lead us to conclude that drug use is:
A necessary cause
A sufficient cause
A necessary and sufficient cause
3. In describing different approaches to the time dimension, criminologist Lawrence Sherman (1995) claims that cross-sectional studies can show differences and that longitudinal studies can show change. How does this statement relate to the three criteria for inferring causation?
4. William Julius Wilson (1996:167) cites the following example of why it’s important to think carefully about units and time. Imagine a 13-bed hospital, in which 12 beds are occupied by the same person for 1 year. The other hospital bed is occupied by 52 people, each staying 1 week. At any given time, 92 percent of beds are occupied by long-term patients (12 out of 13); but over the entire year, 81 percent of patients are short-term patients (52 out of 64). Discuss the implications of a similar example, in which “jail cell” is substituted for “hospital bed.”
5. Review the box titled “What Is Recidivism?” From that discussion, write conceptual and operational definitions for recidivism. Summarize how Fabelo proposes to measure the concept. Finally, discuss possible reliability and validity issues associated with Fabelo’s proposed measure.
6. Each year, publications such as the Places Rated Almanac attract praise from residents of highly rated cities and protests from those who live in lower-rated areas. The 1997 edition rated Orange County, California (where Babbie lived at the time), first and Newark, New Jersey (where Maxfield worked at the time), last. Find a recent edition of this or a similar rating guide, and discuss the measurement procedures used for developing the ratings. If appropriate, criticize how various dimensions of the ratings have been operationalized. Can you spot and explain any apparent anomalies in the ratings? For example, the 1997 edition rated Gary, Indiana, higher than Santa Fe, New Mexico.
7. Discuss possible reliability and validity issues with these indicators of pace of life. Be sure to specify a conceptual definition for “pace of life.”
8. We all have some sort of mental image of the pace of life. In a fascinating book titled Geography of Time, Robert Levine (1997) operationalized the pace of life in cities around the world with a composite measure of the following:
How long it took a single pedestrian to walk 60 feet on an un-crowded sidewalk.
What percentage of public clocks displayed the correct time.
How long it took to purchase the equivalent of a first-class postage stamp with the equivalent of a $5 bill.
