Structure of BJS Workshop

Individual Projects

Program participants are expected to arrive with a project in mind and a data set available to use. This project is crucial to integrating the discussions from the seminar into a personally meaningful framework. Individual presentations on the project will be given at the beginning and end of the seminar. At the beginning, participants will describe the theoretical and/or policy rationale for the project and the plan for analysis. In the final days of the seminar, participants will provide a summary of progress and findings.

Seminar Meetings

The seminar will meet each day from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Additionally, several lunches are scheduled with guest speakers between 11:30 and 1:00 p.m. When there is a lunch meeting, the seminar will usually end by 3:00 p.m., although it may run over in some cases. Staff also attempt to schedule individual or small group consultations with speakers as appropriate.

Discussions within the seminars will center on issues raised in the readings, by speakers and by the demands of participants' projects. To provide some continuity as throughout the workshop, specific methodological (e.g. combining contextual and individual levels of analysis, accommodating measurement error) and substantive themes (e.g. establishing and interpreting disparity in criminal justice system decision-making) that are common across data sets will be highlighted.

Information Covered

The seminar will provide an introduction to the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data and a number of data sets available in the archive. Emphasis will be given to Bureau of Justice Statistics data that describe the principal activities of the criminal justice system. Data that describe 1) the incidence of crime (National Crime Victimization Survey), 2) police response (Uniform Crime Reports and National Incident-Based Reporting System), and 3) the execution of sentences (National Corrections Reporting Program and Survey of Inmates of Local Jails). These data sets will be described briefly since most of the basic descriptive data will be in the readings. Participants will have the opportunity to manipulate these data in lab sessions. More complex issues pertaining to sampling error, measurement error and file structure issues will be described and methods for dealing with these issues will be presented. The goal at the end of the workshop is to have participants ready to use these data correctly to inform theoretical and methodological issues.

Readings

Recommended readings on the outline that follows will acquaint participants with: (1) the design and uses of these data, (2) methodological issues relevant to the use of the data sets, and 3) logistical problems that complicate the use of these data. The reading has been kept to a minimum and workshop participants are expected to read the material for class.

A very large number of additional readings will be on reserve in the Summer Program library. They include numerous studies that use the key data sets in the archive as well as methodologically oriented papers that address issues that commonly come up when working with available data. Participants are free to review this material as they see fit.