8-3 Practice Activity: create and investigate a research question on Criminal Justice program

Overview

For your final course in the Criminal Justice program, you will be expected to create and investigate a research question. To help you prepare for that task, each course in the program will include an assignment in which you will review various research topics and submit at least one research question to your instructor for feedback. You will record your questions from each course in an ePortfolio so you can easily access them to develop your final research question.

Prompt

Using the topics listed below (or others covered in this course), create one to three research questions and submit them to your instructor. This assignment is graded based on completion, and instructor feedback should help you strengthen your questions for future use. After you have submitted these questions to your instructor, upload the questions (and the list of potential topics below, if you wish) to your ePortfolio PDF.

To view some sample research questions, refer to this research resource from the Shapiro Library. There is also a helpful page that addresses research question creation and expectations that you may want to explore.

Note: If this is the first time you are submitting a research question to support your work in the final course, you should create a folder within your ePortfolio with the title “Research Questions,” as you will be adding questions to this folder throughout the program. Follow these ePortfolio instructions PDF on creating a folder within your ePortfolio.

Topics:

• Types and classifications of offenders as defined by law
• Types of crime as defined by law
• The relationship between sociology and criminology
• How classical and positivist schools of thought have influenced criminal justice practices
• How biological and psychological theories have influenced criminal justice practices
• How sociological theories have influenced criminal justice practices
• How critical and interactionist theories may explain criminal behavior and influence the criminal justice system
• How criminal justice professionals utilize criminological theories
• How cultural views and values drive human behavior
• The importance of applying theory versus making broad generalizations to explain behavior
• The role of ethics in the application of theory
• The correlation between criminal behavior theory and criminal justice practice
• The importance of integrating biological, sociological, and environmental factors in an effort to explain criminal behavior

Specifically, the following rubric criterion must be addressed:

• Submit one to three research questions based on a topic covered in this course.