Basic Statistics in Criminology and Criminal Justice

David Weisburd is a leading researcher and scholar in criminology and criminal justice. He is Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University in Virginia and Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor Weisburd has received many awards and prizes for his contributions to criminology and criminal justice including the Stockholm Prize inCriminology and the Sutherland and Vollmer Awards from the American Society of Criminology.Chester Britt was a leading researcher and scholar in the field of criminology. During his career, he taught at a number of universities and led departments at Northeastern University, Arizona State University, and theUniversity of Iowa. His research addressed theories of criminal behavior and victimization, demography of crime and criminal careers, criminal justice decision-making, and quantitative research methods.David B. Wilson is a Professorin the Criminology, Law and Society Department at George Mason University in Virginia. He is a social psychologist and leading applied statistician in the field of criminology, and was therecipient of the Mosteller Award from the Campbell Collaboration for his contributions to the science of systematic review and meta-analysis. Alese Wooditch is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Temple University. She received her PhD from George Mason University. Professor Wooditch is interested in innovative spatial statistical analyses in the area of criminology and criminal justice experimental and computational criminology, and quantitative methodological issues.

• Introduction: Statistics as a Research Tool.- Measurement: the Basic Building Block of Research.- Representing and Displaying Data.- Describing the Typical Case: Measures of Central Tendency.- How Typical is the Typical Case?: Measuring Dispersion.- The Logic of Statistical Inference: Making Statements About Populations from Sample Statistics.- Defining the Observed Significance Level of a Test: A simple Example Using the Binomial Distribution.- Steps in a Statistical Test: Using the Binomial Distribution to Make Decisions About Hypotheses.- Chi-Square: A Test Commonly Used for Nominal-Level Measures.- The Normal Distribution and Its Application to Tests of Statistical Significance.- Comparing Means and Proportions in Two Samples.- Comparing Means Among More than Two Samples: Analysis of Variance.- Measures of Association for Nominal and Ordinal Variables.- Measuring Association for Interval-Level Data: Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient.- An Introduction to Bivariate Regression