The Practice of Research in Criminology and Criminal Justice (PDF)

Ronet D. Bachman, PhD, worked as a statistician at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, before going back to an academic career; she is now a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. She is coauthor of Statistical Methods for Criminology and Criminal Justice and coeditor of Explaining Criminals and Crime: Essays in Contemporary Criminal Theory. In addition, she is the author of Death and Violence on the Reservation and coauthor of Stress, Culture, and Aggression; Murder American Style; and Violence: The Enduring Problem; along with numerous articles and papers that examine the epidemiology and etiology of violence, with particular emphasis on women, the elderly, and minority populations as well as research examining desistance from crime. Her most recent federally funded research was a mixed-methods study that examined the long-term desistance trajectories of drug-involved offenders who were released from prison in 1990, followed from 1990 through 1995, and interviewed again in 2009.

Russell K. Schutt, PhD, is a professor and the chair of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a lecturer on sociology in the Department of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School (Massachusetts Mental Health Center). He completed his BA, MA, and PhD (1977) at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Sociology of Social Control Training Program at Yale University (1977–1979). His other books include Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research and Fundamentals of Social Work Research (with Ray Engel), Making Sense of the Social World (with Dan Chambliss), and Research Methods in Psychology (with Paul G. Nestor)—all with SAGE Publications, as well as Homelessness, Housing, and Mental Illness (Harvard University Press) and Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society