go about the important yet difficult task of testing any criminological theory, a .... theoryâtesters, I have one final note of caution concerning asking a good .... Criminology but at least we will get good reviews so we can revise it and send it.
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Theory Testing In Criminology
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We seem to be facing a virtual embarrassment of riches with respect to contemporary criminological theory. To be sure, it appears that we have as many varieties of explanations as to why people break the law as ways that Wile E. Coyote has used to try to snuff out the Roadrunner. We have control theories (social control, self‐control, power‐control, control balance, see Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990; Hagan, Gillis, & Simpson, 1985; Hirschi, 1969; Tittle, 1995), learning theories (Akers, 2009; Bandura, 1978), strain theories (classic strain, revised strain, general strain, see Agnew, 1985, 1992; Merton, 1938), rational‐choice theories (from deterrence to Bayesian updating, see Anwar & Loughran, 2011; Nagin & Pogarsky, 2001), theories of support and theories of coercion (Colvin, 2000; Cullen, 1994), as well as those from feminist camps (Daly & Chesney‐Lind, 1988), the Marxian tradition (Quinney, 1974), those aimed at the macro level (Pratt & Cullen, 2005) and those that focus on individuals (Andrews & Bonta, 2010), and integrated theories (Braithwaite, 1989), mid‐range theories (Currie, 1997), general theories (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990), and the list goes on. Clearly, we are not suffering from a shortage of ideas. The problem is that we have arguably reached a point where the production of new theoretical explanations is outpacing the production of empirical tests of the core propositions of the theories that we already have. Empirical tests – particularly those conducted under a wide variety of methodological conditions – are necessary if we are, as a field, ever going to know which of our theories are better than others. Ideally, enough tests of a theory’s core statements would accumulate to the point where a meta‐analysis could be undertaken – something that has already occurred to a limited extent in criminological theory (Braga & Weisburd, 2012; Hoeve et al., 2012; Nivette, 2011; Pratt & Cullen, 2000, 2005; Pratt et al., 2006; Pratt et al., 2010), The Handbook of Criminological Theory, First Edition. Edited by Alex R. Piquero. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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but we still have much more work to do. Put simply, we need more empirical tests of criminological theories. The purpose of this chapter is to provide the field with a set of guidelines for how to go about testing criminological theories. I must offer the caveat, however, that these guidelines are certainly not foolproof. Nevertheless, through my own trial and error, and in talking with a number of scholars who are incredibly good at this (much better than I am), these guidelines should help those doing theory testing to more consistently get their work published in peer‐reviewed outlets. And unlike most lists like this that typically only go to 10, this list, out of respect for Spinal Tap, goes to 11.
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Guidelines for Testing Criminological Theories 1. Learn some skills
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This may seem a bit too general, but its importance cannot be overstated. If one is to go about the important yet difficult task of testing any criminological theory, a certain skill‐set must first be in place. At minimum, these skills must include writing well and understanding a wide array of research methods. And gaining these skills is likely to entail engaging in a rather painful process of honest self‐reflection. You need to take a good, hard look at your abilities and then critically evaluate what things you do well and which ones you do not. And with respect to writing and methodological prowess, we all have room for improvement. So how do we improve our skills? Most of us received some form of methodological training in our graduate programs, but new methods are being produced rapidly – far more quickly than graduate curricula can accommodate them into the classroom. Thus, scholars who wish to be at the top of their theory‐testing game over the course of their career will have to continue to educate themselves as new methods emerge. And another good reason to have a strong – and more importantly, eclectic – methodological skill‐set is so that you will not have to define (and therefore c onfine) yourself as either a quantitative or qualitative criminologist (although some people enthusiastically embrace such labels). You can instead call yourself a criminologist and be safe in the knowledge that you have command of whatever methodological “tool” you will need to answer whatever criminological question you have decided to ask. And how do you become a better writer so that your theory tests will actually be read and understood? First of all, care about writing – treat it as a priority. Then, read the work of those authors whose writing you respect and admire (we all have our favorites). And do not limit your roster of favorite authors to criminologists! Do your best to deconstruct what they do, what kind of language they use, what their transitions look like, and how they structure their arguments. Become intimately familiar with this work and then do your best to “reverse engineer” what they do. The best writers in our discipline have been doing this very thing for years with the work that they themselves admire.
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2. Become familiar with the datasets used in the field
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There is a lot of secondary data analysis that goes on in theory testing in criminology. This is not surprising given the central role that life‐course perspectives play in the discipline. Thus, a handful of longitudinal datasets have become critically important to those who wish to do theory testing. Accordingly, scholars should familiarize themselves with all of the “usual suspects” here – as well as how they have been used. Important studies include the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health; see, e.g., Daigle, Beaver, & Turner, 2010; Haynie, Weiss, & Piquero, 2008), along with the National Youth Survey (NYS; see, e.g., Lee, Menard, & Bouffard, 2014; Pogarsky, Kim, & Paternoster, 2005), the Gang Resistance, Education, and Training data (GREAT; see, e.g., Esbensen et al., 2012; Turanovic & Pratt, 2013), and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY; see, e.g., Piquero, Brezina, & Turner, 2005; Shulman, Steinberg, & Piquero, 2013). There are, of course, several others, including those coming out of Cambridge, Rochester, and Chicago just to name a few. And becoming familiar with the measures these datasets contain, their apparent advantages and disadvantages, and how they have been used in prior literature, will make for a much stronger theory‐tester.
3. Know the literature
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I have reviewed hundreds of manuscripts submitted to peer‐reviewed journals – some of which focused on testing criminological theories, others tackling other topics. But a common thread that runs through nearly every article that receives my recommendation of rejection is that the coverage of the research literature fell short. The importance of reading everything you can get your hands on is critical. And I mean everything. To be sure, to know what the next logical contribution to a body of literature should be requires first knowing what has already been done. And not just those studies confined to our discipline’s journals – criminology is inherently interdisciplinary, and scholars coming out of psychology, sociology, economics, political science, public health, social work, and genetics/biology all have something to say about criminal behavior. It is important to know this work as well. This is not to say that every single study that has ever been conducted in a particular theoretical tradition needs to be cited and discussed in a manuscript’s front end, but it does require you to know the literature well enough to know which pieces do, in fact, need to be cited and discussed. And the only way to really know that is to have covered the full set of literature. Just keep reading.
4. Ask a good question Of course, asking a good question can only be done if you know the literature! And in criminology, asking a good question means asking a good research question – one that is answerable. Such a question need not be asked in a way that demands a yes or
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no answer (although questions framed in such a way are typically good ones), but rather it needs to be asked in such a way that the set of potential answers is evident. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this point is with some examples of what might be termed “bad” and “good” research questions. Bad: What are the direct and indirect effects of strain on delinquency? Good: Is the effect of strain on delinquency conditioned by social support? (or some other conditioner that you might be focusing on empirically). Bad: Do online routine activities predict victimization? Good: Does risky online purchasing predict identity theft? Bad: Why do most caregivers of children of incarcerated parents experience negative outcomes but not all? Good: What are the social processes responsible for variation in the experiences of caregivers of children of incarcerated parents? In each of these examples the “bad” questions are not necessarily terrible – I have reviewed (and rejected) many manuscripts from journals where the question was far less clear and some manuscripts where I could never figure out what the question was. The key for the “good” questions, however, is specificity. What, exactly, are you trying to uncover in this test of a criminological theory? Be precise. And there is a larger lesson to be conveyed here in terms of asking the right question, and it concerns how to go about communicating that question to some important people – journal editors and reviewers. Keep in mind that the people who will be evaluating your test of a criminological theory are not nearly as invested in your study as you are. They are busy people who are cramming this review into their already packed schedules. Thus, you will want to establish your research question and its importance to them as quickly as possible, and that should be done in your manuscript’s introduction. And while scholars differ in terms of how they tend to go about doing this, I have found that all good introductions have three primary parts, and often times those three parts can be handled in three paragraphs. The first part entails demonstrating to the reader the broad context in which you are locating your study. Is it a self‐control paper? Or a life‐course paper? Whatever it is, the first part of the introduction is where the reader will be clued into the broad body of literature that you are proposing to make a contribution to with your empirical test. The second part of the introduction concerns identifying some tangible “problem” in the literature. This part is critical and can often be the most difficult part of a manuscript to write, since in this section you must identify some significant gap in the literature (please, never refer to it as a “lacuna”; please, just don’t) and convince the readers that this gap is consequential. It is not enough in this section to merely point out that “research has not yet addressed this issue.” There are lots of issues that have not been addressed, many for good reason. The key here is to avoid the lazy method of justifying your study on the basis that it has not been done; move to the more intellectually rigorous model of justifying it on the basis that it needs to be done. Finally, the third part of the introduction, after the problem has been identified, is where you will introduce your research question that is intended to address that very problem. In this section it is also useful to map out what data you will be using and what methodological approach you will be taking.
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The key here is that in relatively quick fashion you are communicating to the readers (1) the broad theoretical area the paper is rooted in; (2) the problem in the literature that needs to be addressed; and (3) how you are planning to address it. And with that in mind, for those of you planning on becoming criminological theory‐testers, I have one final note of caution concerning asking a good research question: ask the right question. By this I mean that it is not uncommon for me to see tests of criminological theories that have up to five or six (or more) different hypotheses that are being proposed. I think this is typically done under the mistaken assumption that more is better. But what this generally indicates is that the five or six questions are being specified only because the authors do not know which one is the right question (a problem that often stems from not knowing the literature very well). Maybe five or six hypotheses are actually warranted in your study, but c arefully evaluate if that is actually the case. Often it is not. In any event, several examples of tests of criminological theories that take this approach to asking their research question(s) can be found in the literature (see Hay & Forrest, 2008; Reisig & Pratt, 2011; Xie & McDowall, 2008).
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5. Get the right data
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Getting the right data to test your research question is not an easy task. Depending on the question, there may be data publicly available or maybe there is not. For life‐ course theory testing, for example, there are really only a few datasets that researchers can use. For other research questions, however, far more options exist. The key here is to use a dataset that contains good measures of the key concepts you are specifying. And if there are data that are already available to you then great; if not, the task will be to collect your own. It is understandable that collecting original data is not always the first resort. So much data is already available to the public and these data sources are well‐known in the field. There is, however, a lingering (and understandable) bias present in the field against using secondary datasets to answer certain criminological questions. The problem, critics cite, is that those data were not collected with our research questions in mind so they are of limited use to us because the measures they contain are often not very good (Maxfield & Babbie, 2010). Collecting original data would therefore be preferable since measures could be constructed solely for the study’s purpose, yet doing so is often resource‐intensive. One option is to use data drawn from samples of college students, who are typically available to criminologists. Yet, there is also a bias present in the field against this as well, where problems such as range restriction on key variables of interest and generalizability are noted (Payne & Chappell, 2008). Nevertheless, studies typically find plenty of variation among college student samples (Reisig, Wolfe, & Pratt, 2012) and most large, publicly available datasets contain so much missing data that they cannot be assumed to be representative of the population from which they are drawn. Thus, it is arguably preferable to use data drawn from student samples and to sacrifice the false promise
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of generalizability for the benefit of precision in measurement. Either way, when going about testing criminological theories, finding the right data is critical.
6. Answer empirically the question you asked
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Studies that get submitted to peer‐reviewed journals often contain a series of unnecessary analyses that seem to have been conducted not because there was a good reason to, but rather simply because they could be. These “supplemental” analyses are not necessarily tied to the primary research question (i.e., “robustness checks” – see point 8 below), but instead appear like disconnected models that are intended to fill up space. These typically come in two forms: split‐sample analyses and examining interaction effects. If, for example, your research question is whether a particular form of risky behavior is related to a particular form of victimization, it is not necessary to split the sample by race or gender to see if the same patterns exist (unless, of course, you have made a strong theoretical case for doing so and it is integrated into your research question). Neither is it necessary to specify a number of interaction terms to “explore” whether some “interesting” conditioning effects pop up (again, unless you’ve already made a strong case up front for estimating them). These additional analyses – which are rarely if ever tied to the research question at hand – should be avoided whenever possible. This may also mean making a case to a journal editor that they are unnecessary if a reviewer on your manuscript asks you to do them (which they do all the time). Just ask your research question, answer it, and stay focused!
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7. Rule out methodological artifacts
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So this is the part where a careful reader might accuse me of contradicting myself. Having just advised you to simply “answer empirically the question you asked” and to avoid unnecessary supplemental analyses, there are additional analyses that probably still need to be done. We refer to these sometimes as “robustness checks” or “sensitivity analyses.” The purpose of these analyses is to ensure that the results you obtained (i.e., the answer to your question) are not a methodological artifact. For example, if it is questionable whether the models should have been estimated with a Poisson or negative binomial specification, it may be important to estimate both to see if the results change in any substantive way. In addition, if it is theoretically plausible to specify a model with a different set of covariates, those models should be estimated as well to ensure that the results you get are not sensitive to a particular way of producing them methodologically. Studies that have asked the right question and have gotten the right data to answer it almost invariably survive these additional analyses, and reviewers and editors tend to have much more confidence in the validity and reliability of the results. Several good examples of this practice can be found in the criminological literature (see Apel et al., 2008; Sampson & Raudenbush, 1999; Turanovic & Pratt, 2014).
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8. Understand the implications of your work
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This tip is directed toward writing the Discussion section to your test of a criminological theory – the last chance you will get to make an impression on the reviewers that your test is an important contribution to the literature. Once again, doing this well requires a firm understanding of the full body of literature that you are drawing from for your empirical test, whatever that may be. And there is a good way of approaching this section and one very, very bad way. The bad way tends to entail some version of re‐stating the major findings from the analyses. Stating the study’s findings should be done in the Results section so stating them once again in the Discussion section is redundant and treats the reader as if they are incapable of remembering something they just read two pages ago. I assure you, they remember. The key here is not to let the reader know what you found, but rather to communicate to them what the findings mean. And doing so requires that you do, in fact, know what they mean! For example, what if you conducted a study that found that the causal mechanisms that lead from victimization to offending are not the same as those that lead from offending to victimization. What are the implications of this finding? What are its theoretical ramifications (i.e., which theoretical perspective is supported by this finding and which ones might be undermined by it)? What are its policy implications? What are its implications for future research? These are the kinds of questions that a good Discussion section does in tests of criminological theories. This is also where you will want to be careful in discussing the limitations of your study. No study is perfect and there are always problems that can (and should be) pointed out – even in really good studies. The sample could be more representative, the measures could be more precise, the models could be specified differently but the data lacked certain variables, and so on. What is curious is that many authors will end their manuscripts with a full paragraph about their study’s limitations! Why do that? You have just spent an entire manuscript justifying your research question and answering it methodologically with sufficient care that you are confident that the results you obtained are “real” and not a methodological artifact, and therefore your study represents a contribution to the field of criminology, and then you are going to end the paper with the whimper of why the results may be of limited value? There is a better way to acknowledge your study’s potential limitations. First, since such limitations are always methodological, they can first be addressed in your study’s Methods section. If there is a limitation with the representativeness of your sample, for example, you can offer up statistical comparisons between your sample and the population from which it was drawn to determine whether your results are likely to be biased in favor of a particular outcome. If a scale that is used to measure a key concept is less than ideal, you can discuss its psychometric properties and relationships with other variables to give the reader confidence that even if it is not perfect it seems to be “behaving” the way it should. And when these limitations are addressed in the Discussion section it is much better to frame them so that they represent opportunities for future research. Put differently, you can use
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9. Seek advice and listen to it
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these limitations as a way to guide future research on the subject by cluing the field in to how they might build off of your work. That’s not a whimper – it’s a call to action that you are directing! Good examples of how to do this are certainly at your disposal (see Kubrin & Stewart, 2006; Matsueda, Kreager, & Huizinga, 2006; Piquero et al., 2013).
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When a reviewer gets the manuscript containing your test of a criminological theory, that should not be the first time a pair of eyes from someone not included in the author roster has seen it. Prior to the manuscript’s submission seek advice from trusted colleagues. If you are a graduate student, this could include your faculty advisors as well as your fellow students (who may also give you more detailed feedback than anyone else). Whatever substantive theoretical area you are working in there are people who are able and willing to help you. But seeking advice, of course, comes with a cost: you will get it. And you will not always like it. You have spent perhaps months (maybe even longer) preparing this manuscript and your test of a criminological theory has become your intellectual progeny. You want to protect it with bear‐like ferocity. And when someone reads your paper and offers up some constructive criticism it might not initially feel so constructive. My advice is to put away your ego and listen to the advice that has been given to you. This does not mean that you need to do exactly what they say, but if they have raised an issue of concern it is likely something that you will somehow need to address. The people who you have asked to read your work want to help you. Let them.
10. Select the right journal
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So you have your test of a criminological theory written up in a clean and error‐free (as much as possible) manuscript that has been revised according to the comments of those whose wise counsel you have sought. Now is the time to make sure that you send your paper to the right journal. There is a perception in the field – at least according to my admittedly nonscientific method of listening to the anecdotes of colleagues – that the best course of action is to send the paper to one of the top journals in the field, regardless of the paper’s quality or content. The idea is expressed in this way: “Sure, it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of being accepted at Criminology but at least we will get good reviews so we can revise it and send it somewhere else.” While authors are free to pursue this strategy at their discretion, it is potentially problematic for three reasons. First, you should already have received good reviews from those colleagues who have read your work and have offered their suggestions for making it better. Second, if you already have a pretty good idea that your criminological test is not going to pass muster at Criminology, waiting for the review process to merely confirm your
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suspicions represents a loss of time that you do not get back. And if you are in the early stages of your career on the tenure track, that loss of time may be more consequential than you think, since the tenure clock is unforgiving. Third, if your paper truly has no shot at such an outlet you are wasting not only your own time but that of the editor and reviewers as well, so avoid voluntarily relinquishing your social capital in this way. Instead, there are two reliable ways to know which journal you should submit your study to, the most straightforward of which is to look to your own reference list to see where the work you are citing most heavily came from. That will be a good quick and dirty indicator of where yours should go too. Second, and even more reliable but also more labor‐intensive, if you truly know the literature in the area you are conducting your test within, you will know what kinds of journals will be a good fit. Even further, if you know the literature well enough you could even have a target journal in mind before you ever start writing. Either way, finding the right journal is critically important when it comes to exposing your test of a criminological theory to the academic world.
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11. Expect to make revisions
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Theory testing in criminology is an iterative process. Ideas take a while to form and scholars are constantly wrestling with themselves over what the right question is and what the best methodological approach is for answering it. So if you are going through those same struggles you have plenty of very talented company. What this also means is that you should expect to make revisions constantly until your study ultimately appears in print. And to that end, every study tends to go through three versions of itself. The first version is the one that exists in your head (or perhaps in a detailed outline). This is the genesis of the idea itself and how you are thinking about approaching it. The next version is the one that you submit to the journal – sometimes it closely resembles the first version but more often than not, once you have completed your study and have written it up, key substantive differences often emerge. And finally, the third version of the paper is the one that exists after you have addressed the concerns raised by the reviewers. And of course, we always tend to think that the version we submitted to the journal is perfect as it is, the final version that has addressed the reviewers’ concerns is always better. Sometimes it just takes us a while to realize that. Either way, accept the fact that undertaking constant revisions is a good thing and that your work will get better and better as a result of doing so.
Conclusion Theory testing in criminology is not for the faint of heart. Mastering the literature, carving out a question that the field will view as necessary, getting the right data, conducting the appropriate analyses, and writing it all up are all challenging tasks in
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and of themselves. But this process is necessary so that new knowledge can be produced and our theoretical perspectives can either be supported or refuted. And as that happens, we need to recognize how theory and methods are fundamentally intertwined. We cannot move theory forward without developing new and better methods of getting after our key theoretical constructs, nor can we develop such methods without theoretical guidance. And as we move forward, the future of theory‐testing in criminology lies primarily in tackling two challenges. First, we need to do a much better job of specifying theoretically and measuring directly the intervening processes that lead to our outcomes of interest. The common practice in theory‐testing is to focus on a particular independent variable – for example, associating with deviant peers – and see if it predicts some outcome (e.g., engaging in delinquent behavior) after controlling for a bunch of other stuff in a multivariate model. The problem with this approach is that it tells us nothing about why something like associating with deviant peers matters – indeed, whatever causal processes are at work typically go unmeasured. This empirical approach, which has been used repeatedly by criminologists for decades, is rapidly reaching its expiration date. Theory testing in the future will be of most value when it is focused on highlighting these intervening social processes. And, second, theory testers in the future should concentrate their efforts on developing better measures of the key concepts in the field, which may entail cutting some ties with our criminological past. A couple of examples may be of help here. When Travis Hirschi (1969) attempted to pit social bond, cultural deviance, and strain theories against one another, he was faced with the daunting task of attempting to measure individuals’ levels of strain. Using survey data from youths, he did so by asking kids what they aspired to be and what they expected to be. This was done under the assumption that youths – particularly those of lower socioeconomic status – would be sufficiently aware of the social and structural impediments they would face in the future that would eventually squash their aspirations. A larger gap between one’s aspirations and expectations would thus indicate greater levels of strain. It turned out in Hirschi’s data that these youths did not really experience any strain (i.e., there was no notable aspirations–expectations gap), which he took as evidence of the weakness of strain theory. But was it? Might it have instead been the case that children do not see much (if any) difference between the words aspirations and expectations, and that the absence of an identifiable gap merely indicates that this was not a very good measure of strain? Strangely enough, however, criminologists embraced this measure and tested it repeatedly in the following years, with studies consistently revealing that strain and crime/delinquency were unrelated (see Burton & Cullen, 1992). Things remained this way until Eric Baumer and Regan Gustafson took a different approach and measured strain according to the differential cultural emphasis on economic success relative to using legitimate means to secure it – a much stronger and theoretically‐faithful measure than the aspirations–expectations gap. And in the process, Baumer & Gustafson (2007) found support for strain theory in what some (myself included) might contend is the only true test of strain theory in the published
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literature. It took a major departure from the measurement strategy of the past to bring us this new knowledge. We need more studies like it. Another example of this problem can be found in the criminological literature on routine activity theory. Early tests of the theory (Cohen & Felson, 1979) used the household activity ratio – an index primarily of female participation in the labor force – as a macro‐level proxy to capture the possible interactions of motivated offenders and suitable targets in the absence of capable guardianship. This was all well and good as a start, but the problem really emerged when scholars started to test the theory at the individual level. In these tests, the macro‐level household activity ratio was translated primarily into individual‐level measures of employment, under the assumption that leaving the home to go to one’s job is “risky” when it comes to victimization. But is having a job really risky? Is leaving the home – in and of itself – risky? Probably not, at least according to Pratt et al. (2014:1.4), who stated that “it is not simply going outside of the house that matters, but it is instead the differential risks associated with what one is actually doing outside – such as planting flowers in a garden versus selling drugs on a street corner – that influence one’s susceptibility to victimization” (emphasis in the original). And yet studies continue to fail to make this distinction in favor of weak measures such as having a job or going shopping. Routine activity theory will continue to languish as long as such measures are allowed to populate our knowledge base. It will be up to the next generation of theory‐testers to do better. In the end, good theory‐testing in criminology means creative theory‐testing. Major contributions come when scholars take risks and improve the way we measure key theoretical constructs. This is not easy and will likely require much in the way of original data collection – something that can be done without much cost in a university setting through student surveys. In doing so, the key will be to develop original measures as opposed to reifying those gleaned from publicly available datasets simply because they have been used in prior research. We need better measures of social control, peer influence, risky routines, coping strategies, and the list goes on. This is the future of theory testing in criminology that we need to embrace.
References
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Agnew, R. (1985). A revised strain theory of delinquency. Social Forces, 64, 151–167. Agnew, R. (1992). Foundation for a general strain theory of crime and delinquency. Criminology, 30, 47–88. Akers, R.L. (2009). Social Learning and Social Structure: A General Theory of Crime and Deviance. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Andrews, D.A., & Bonta, J. (2010). The Psychology of Criminal Conduct, 5th edition. New Provence, NJ: Matthew Bender and Company. Anwar, S., & Loughran, T.A. (2011). Testing a Bayesian learning theory of deterrence among serious juvenile offenders. Criminology, 49, 667–698. Apel, R., Bushway, S.D., Paternoster, R., Brame, R., & Sweeten, G. (2008). Using state child labor laws to identify the causal effect of youth employment on deviant behavior and academic achievement. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 24, 337–362.
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