What are the three stages in formulating a criminological research question?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Formulating a research question is often an intensely personal process in addition to being a scientific or professional one. Curiosity about the social world may emerge from your “personal troubles,” as Mills (1959) put it, or personal experiences. Examples of these troubles or experiences could range from how you feel about injustices raised against you in your past or present to an awareness you may have that crime is not randomly distributed within a city but that there seem to be “good” or safe parts of town and “bad” or unsafe areas. Can you think of other possible research questions that flow from your own experience in the world?
The experience of others is another fruitful source of research questions. Knowing a relative who was abused by a partner, seeing a TV special about violence, or reading a gang member’s autobiography can stimulate questions about general criminological processes. Can you draft a research question based on a relative’s experiences, a TV show, or a book?
The primary source of research questions for many researchers is theory. Many theoretical domains are used to inform research questions in our discipline, including sociological, psychological, and criminological theories. Some researchers spend much of their careers conducting research intended to refine an answer to one central question. For example, you may find rational choice theory to be a useful approach to understanding diverse forms of social behavior, such as crime, because you think people seem to make decisions on the basis of personal cost-benefit calculations. So you may ask whether rational choice theory can explain why some people commit crimes and others do not or why some people decide to quit committing crimes while others continue their criminal ways.
Finally, some research questions adopt a very pragmatic rationale concerning their research design. You may focus on a research question posed by someone else because doing so seems to be to your professional or financial advantage. For instance, some researchers conduct research on specific questions posed by a funding source in what is termed a request for proposals (RFP). (Sometimes the acronym RFA is used, meaning request for applications.) Or you may learn that the public defenders in your city are curious as to whether they are more successful in getting their clients acquitted of a criminal charge than private lawyers.