Texas State University

School of Criminal Justice

Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam for Research Methods

October 23, 2012

11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

DIRECTIONS: Choose Option One or Option Two. Save two electronic copies of your answer (one with just your ID number assigned to you, the other with your ID number and name). Email both copies to . Print out a hard copy as well with both your id number and name written on it.

Option 1

Earlier this year the national media was dominated by the story about a neighborhood watchman (George Zimmerman) who shot and killed a teenager (Trayvon Martin). This is a tragic event and the outcome of the case is far from settled. It is neither the first, nor the last, time race and ethnicity will fuel controversy in criminal justice decision-making. Just prior to the Zimmerman/Martin altercation there was another similar incident involving a Black officer and a White suspect. These cases are very similar; however, the latter received almost no media attention.

More than one criminal justice observer has asked whether the race and ethnicity of the officer and suspect determine whether a case will be described as “racially motivated.” More succinctly, is an officer/citizen contact involving a White officer and Black suspect more likely to be perceived as racially motivated than an officer/citizen contact involving a Black officer and a White suspect? Describe how you would design a study to answer this question. In your response:

  • Identify and justify the specific research method (e.g. survey, interviews, experiment, etc.) you will use,
  • Describe and justify your sampling strategy,
  • State your null and alternative hypotheses,
  • Identify and justify the variables you will use, including their conceptual definitions and how you intend to operationalize them,
  • Identify the potential threats to validity and reliability and how you intend to mitigate them in your study,
  • Briefly describe and justify how you intend to analyze the data, and
  • Identify any potential ethical issues you may encounter, in particular those involving the protection of human subjects, and how you might avoid them.

Option 2

Read the summary of the Terrill & Paoline study (below) and answer the questions listed below.

Terrill and Paoline (2011) published a study that compared the injury rates when Conducted Energy Devices (CEDs, a.k.a. Tasers) were used with the rates of injury when other use of force options were used. The study was conducted using data from 8 mid-to-large size police departments from across the United States. The data included 13,913 use of force incidents and citizen injury occurred in 4,447 (31.9%) of these incidents. These data were taken from agency use of force reports over a two-year period.

The dependent variable was citizen injury, and this was coded in three different ways. The first was a dichotomous injury/no injury measure. The second was an ordinal scale that assessed the severity of the injury (no injury, bruises/abrasions, lacerations, broken bones). If the Taser probe punctured the skin of a citizen, this was coded as a laceration. If the Taser was used to drive stun the citizen (i.e. the citizen was touched with the CED rather than being shot with the probes) and this left a mark, this injury was coded as a bruise/abrasion. The third variable was also an ordinal measure that assessed the severity of injury based upon hospitalization (no injury, injury but not transported to hospital, injury and transported to the hospital). Sub-categorizations of these variables were also created, but are not important here.

The primary independent variable was type of force used. A series of dichotomous variables were used to create a classification system. The “CED only” variable was coded as a 1 when the CED and no other force was used. The “CED with other” variable was coded as a 1 when CED and some other force was utilized, and the “CED none” variable was coded as 1 when other force was used, but a CED was not. A series of control variables for various demographic factors and the specific city were also included. Level of citizen resistance was additionally included in the models.

The results indicated that people were approximately 1.5 to 2.0 times more likely to be injured when a Taser was used (controlling for the other variables in the study). This is in direct conflict with other results on CED injuries. These other studies did not code the puncturing of the skin by a Taser probe or a mark left by a drive stun as injuries. The other studies argued that, because the Taser was functioning as it was designed when these events occurred, these types of marks should not be coded as injuries.

  • Identify problems unique to using secondary datasets.
  • Identify any threats to internal validity and strategies one may use in a replication to mitigate.
  • Identify external validity threats, how it occurs in this study and possible ways to mitigate in future replications.
  • Discuss the concept “citizen injury,” how it was measured and alternate measures that could have been used to improve the measurement of this concept.
  • Discuss key ethical concepts the researcher may have encountered in presenting this research to the IRB and how it may have been presented to the IRB.

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