Discuss the application of knowledge to data development

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

• Another obstacle to applying knowledge in the context of organizations, researchers, and the research process may arise from the nature of the data themselves. Although these data may be useful for some research purposes, such as describing national trends, they are often much less useful for management purposes.
• The aggregation or combination of data at the national, statewide, and even city level will mask great differences within the jurisdiction. Furthermore, crime and other rates depend on population estimates for their accuracy, and such estimates are less accurate for local levels. The irony is that, although there is some reason for confidence in some of the measures used in criminal justice research, those measures are the least reliable at the local level, and that is where data can be the most influential in the decision-making and management processes.
• Developing useful and reliable data has been a particular concern in the area of drug policy. There, too, national surveys of drug use can be informative but provide little data to direct drug treatment or intervention at the local level. These measures should be important for drug policy but remain little used because the estimates often suffer from a perceived lack of credibility (in the case of self-reported drug use) and because the politics of drug policy has not placed a premium on the use of data.
• It is critical, then, that data be valid and reliable if they are to be part of the decision-making or policy-making process. But validity and reliability must be considered in the context of the decisions being made. And because most criminal justice services are provided at the local level, that is the level at which accurate data is needed.