Corrections and Juvenile Justice - Research Proposal Example

Initially, a letter of interest will be sent to the potential participants, and after receiving the returned responses of interest, an informed consent form will be forwarded to the one hundred subjects. Furthermore, purposive sampling technique will be adopted Participant’s gender (i.e. male), availability to do the study, age (at least 18 years of age), current mental health status, and incarceration status will be included in the selection criteria since they are very important for the purpose of this research.

Informed Consent Neuman (2000) argued that research can and should be conducted in an ethical manner. Every attempt would be made to conduct the research in an ethical manner. Since the participants would be at least eighteen years of age, consent would not be necessary from the Department of Children and Family Services. However, in order to address other ethical concerns, informed consent form will be obtained from the participants. All the participants will be informed that their participation is completely voluntary.

All interested participants will be made aware of the study's research goals, as well as its ethical mandates. In addition, participants will be allowed to withdraw their participation at any time and that no financial incentives would be offered as compensation for their participation. Participants could also refuse to participate in this study at any stage. The informed consent form will also address the issues of participant anonymity and confidentiality. Anonymity of the participants will be ensured by offering each participant the option to choose a pseudonym for himself.

Confidentiality will be ensured by removing any names or identifying characteristics of the participants from all records. To circumvent the risk of psychological harm, participants will be treated with the utmost respect, consideration, and sympathy. Data Collection Clinical records from a private subsidiary of the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) concerning the subjects would be utilized in order to assess historical and current behavior. Clinical records of participants would also be helpful in this study as they will provide useful information including: an account of psychiatric familial histories, and a validated Axis I Diagnosis as found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2000).

Furthermore, social history, familial involvement, peer relationships, psychological evaluations with intelligence quotient (IQ) score, history of housing placements, demographics, history of incarcerations including probation/incarceration reports, and purpose of wardship entry reports would also be available in the clinical records. In an effort to effectively provide an analysis of the hypotheses, research would be conducted by reviewing various articles or related literature, and methods/techniques currently utilized in identifying potential criminal behavior characteristics in juvenile offenders.

This study will also refer to the practices and techniques that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Behavioral Science Unit uses in formulating criminal profiles for reliability purposes. The purpose of this study is to determine how a sample of incarcerated youth would score on a violence predictor assessment instrument, which is designed to predict