Sourcebooks and Research Issues: Keeping Students Critical and Aware

Abstract

This article describes how to use a review of the literature on crime and criminality to teach about research problems in an undergraduate sociology course. Students examined a subset of the original articles summarized in a review to evaluate the authors' research. A focus on the ways in which to study crime showed how measurement issues influenced the conclusions drawn about criminal behavior. We encouraged students to identify and interpret the possible causes of social behavior. To demonstrate how to develop and test causal models, we introduced pictorial representations of simple and multivariate models.