Running head: IMPROPER EVIDENCE HANDLING 1

Allegations of Improper Evidence Handling at the FBI

Kenna M. Mooney

Park University

Criminal Justice 311 / Spring I 2018

Professor Scheffner
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For CJ 430, all students will complete a research proposal that examines the following seven basic

topical issues relating to the study of research methods in criminal justice:

1. What are the major differences between the scientific approach and the human inquiry

approach to causal and probabilistic reasoning?

a. Casual and probabilistic reasoning – future circumstances are caused or conditioned

by present ones. The patterns of cause and effect are probabilistic in nature.

b. Science makes causality and probability more explicit.

c. The goal is to understand why certain things are related, why patterns occur, to

enable us to make more accurate predictions.

d. Ordinary human inquiry - Aims at answering both "what" and "why" questions,

involves causal and probabilistic reasoning, a desire to predict future circumstances

e. Probabilistic reasoning - When something happens more often when the causes

occur than when they're absent, not always though

2. What are the major ethical considerations and issues in research and what methods are used

to address these?

3. What are the various levels of measurement and the key standards for measuring validity and

reliability?

4. What are the major methods of collecting data and the importance of the type of research in

dictating decisions of data collection?

5. What are the major differences and usages of statistics and types of data in the various

research reports and evaluations?

6. What are the characteristics and differences between quantitative and qualitative data as they

apply to field research?

IMPROPER EVIDENCE HANDLING 3

7. What are the different techniques and options available for collecting and recording field

observations?