Research design in psychology-week 5 - Essay Example

Potential research questions as far as the quantitative approach towards addressing the issue of juvenile crime can be descriptive, predictive or casual. A descriptive question for this quantitative research can be ‘What is the relationship between the social environment and juvenile crime?”. A predictive question can be “Does the social environment predict the juveniles’ ability to indulge in crime?” A casual question which compares the different variations of a phenomenon to identify the cause of something can be “does variation in exposure to different social environments produce a change in a juvenile’s ability to commit offences?

” These research questions can be addressed by either limiting the scope of the research to certain factors of the social environment like dynamics of the family, community support or the effect of the media and music. A possible hypothesis for adopting a quantitative approach to this area could be relayed in the following way: “If the social environment has an impact on juvenile crime, then there should be an observable correlation between various social factors in the lives of juveniles and their rate on criminal behavior.

” A breakdown of the factors that constitute to the social environment (such as domestic violence, substance abuse, peer pressure or schooling etc) can be used as independent variables whose relationship will have to be determined on juvenile delinquency (the dependant variable). Looking at the research by adopting a qualitative approach the possible potential research question one might ask is ‘What role does the social environment play a role in the lives of juveniles and their ability to commit crimes?

” Other research questions relating to the issue at hand could be ‘Why do juveniles commit crimes?’ or ‘How can juvenile crime be prevented?’ or So while our quantitative approach tends to find out if there is a possible relationship between our two defined variables the qualitative approach will analyze this relationship and go into the depth of it. Qualitative research will analyze and evaluate the criminal behavior of juveniles through a social learning perspective. Even though in qualitative research we do not use quantities, they can be used to prove or disprove a hypothesis, however primarily it is used to gather and analyze data.

Resources Creswell, J. (2009). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches. (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,