Measuring Crime: Understanding Crime Data and Trends

The Measuring Crime module will help you to develop highly valuable skills in data-handling and analysis. It is a module about crime data, particularly data from sources that influence criminal justice policy and practice. The data we use also informs government and the general public about the nature (and the extent) of crime.

Focusing on the Crime Survey for England and Wales, Police Recorded Crime, and criminal justice statistics from the courts, our lectures explore issues around data generation, reliability, validity and the ways it can be presented.

In the accompanying computer-based workshops, you will learn how to analyse and present data using Excel and SPSS. In these workshops we also consider data that has been used in previously published research, this data is based on the official criminal histories of offenders. Our learning approach gives you an extremely well-rounded understanding of some of the most influential information about crime.