Logged out
Access All our Essays in an Instant
Swap your work for FREE access, or pay £4.99 for instant access
Assess the usefullness of statistical data in the study of crime and deviance
Member rating: No Rating | Words: 1432 | Submitted: Sun Feb 17 2008
Page Preview
On the left is an image preview of every page of this document, and below are the first 150 words with formatting removed:
Assess the usefulness of statistical data in the study of crime and deviance. Official statistics seem to indicate that crime levels are rapidly on the increase, from being a few hundred thousand in the 50's and 60's to more than 6 million in today's world. However the debate in the usefulness of statistics in relation to the study of crime has provoked many different arguments. Durkheim and Conte are the Positivists who believe that they are useful. They believe this because using statistics is the closest sociology can get to a scientific experiment. As statistics provoke quantitave data it is open to be testable and comparable with previous results. Against this belief are the Anti-Positivists who say that statistical data is not reliable, as it doesn't establish a cause and effect for the reasons behind committing crime. It may depend upon the context of the situation an individual is placed...
To see the full version of this document, and 145,348 others
