Solving Criminological Puzzles
The editors of this volume have identified their goal as describing "… how research is really done, not just focusing on the end result-new methods or data sets” that is, to provide "… case studies, not of the innovations themselves, but of the thought processes that led to these research ideas” (Maltz, 2013). The specific charge to me was “In particular, aside from producing a bumper crop of researchers, you’ve played with crime and related data in ways that broke new ground. Too many people have a tendency to grab some data sets, toss them into one of the [four standard general purpose statistical analysis software packages], look for a nice low p-value, and write a paper (and perhaps a career) using it-which is something not found in your work (and that of your former students). What we’d like you to do is explain how you approach problems, how you know whether your findings are significant, when you feel that a new statistical approach is needed” (Maltz, 2013).
