Headings: !!Resources for Deviant Behavior Courses !!!!Hot Topics !!!!Critical Thinking !!!!Data !!!!Individual Assignments, Exercises, and Class Projects !!!!Previous syllabi !!!!Repository of tables, graphs and images for classroom use
- 27% of all males aged 15-19 had unprotected sex in the last 12 months according to this report
. The rates, however, differ significantly by race. For instance, 39% of black males, 37% of Hispanic males, and 23% of white males in this age group had unprotected sex in the last 12 months. Data are from 1995. For more details see page 17. The report is from the Urban Institute and uses survey data as well as official statistics to describe the phenomenon of young male sexual behavior and health and develops some policy recommendations.
- Trends in risk-taking behavior in children and adolescents are described in this report published by the Urban Institute. For instance, current cocaine use increased by 135% (from 1.7% to 4%) between 1990-1999, current marijuana use by 82% (from 15% to 17%), and frequent cigarette use by 32% (from 13% to 17%). On the other hand, involvement in fights decreased by 16% (from 43% to 36%), and weapon carrying decreased by 34% (from 26% to 17%) over the same period of time (see page 8 in the linked report).
- Median earnings for gay men are $3,000 below the income of men with female partners. However the gap is smaller in states with workplace-protection laws and larger where this legal protection doesn't exist according to two reports released by the Urban Institute. Both reports use the 1% public use micro-data set from the 2000 Census. The first report shows that the gap in earnings persists even when controlling for age and education. A figure is also available in pdf format . The other report shows the difference between the earnings of less educated men in states with and without legal protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. This report is also available in pdf format .
- 1600 inmates are released from prison every day in the U.S. This report describes their post-release lives using a wealth of data. An even more detailed portrait is offered for case studies from Texas, Maryland, Illinois, Ohio, and New Jersey. All reports show statistics of incarceration and release trends. All were provided by the Urban Institute.
- Sociologists' estimates of the risk-taking behavior among youth depend on the methods they use. For instance a recent version of the "National Survey of Adolescent Males" experimented with so-called "Audio- and Computer- Assisted Self Interviews" (Audio-CASI). In the experiment, respondents are randomly assigned either to the experimental or the control group. Respondents in the control group fill out the regular self-administered paper questionnaire, respondents in the experimental group hear questions through headphones which are connected to a laptop computer and enter responses using the computer keyboard. They can also see the questions on the computer screen. For some very sensitive behavior such as sharing of IV drug needles and gun carrying, Audio-CASI elicited greater responses than the paper method. See this report for a graphical visualization of some of the results from the experiment; the study was conducted by the Urban Institute.
- The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) preserves and distributes computerized crime and justice data from Federal agencies, state agencies, and investigator initiated research projects to users for secondary statistical analysis. Data is stored at ICPSR. Provides access to Research Reports and Statistics, access to data files, or an Online Analysis option.
- Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics brings together data from more than 100 US sources about many aspects of criminal justice in the country. Data mostly displayed in tables in pdf format. Organized by topic, e.g. Characteristics of the criminal justice systems, Public attitudes toward crime and criminal justice-related topics, Nature and distribution of known offenses, Characteristics and distribution of persons arrested, Judicial processing of defendants, Persons under correctional supervision.
- Bureau of Justice Statistics. An excellent source of summary reports and raw data on all aspects of crime and the justice system.
- Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics
- FBI. Data from the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. This tries to get law enforcement agencies to use a common "code book" for the recording of crime.
- Interpol offers topical reports and international crime statistics. The source is limited in scope but contains cross-national data.
- Federal Bureau of Prisons offers an overview of basic statistics regarding corrective institutions, staff, inmates, types of offenses committed by inmates, and imposed sentences. Good for some quick facts. Unfortunately the Bureau doesn?t offer historical statistics, so an analysis of trends over time is not possible.
- The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, better known as the DSM. Written by the American Psychiatric Association and re-written several times since its first publication in 1952. Its history is an interesting document of the history of science and of the history of our thinking about mental health and illness.
- Office of Applied Statistics Very comprehensive statistics about drugs and alcohol use but a little hard to navigate through. Organized primarily by substance (e.g. alcohol, heroin etc) and secondarily by demographics (e.g. age, ethnic/racial groups etc.)
- International Victimology Website collects information about any type of research related to victimization in any country. Doesn?t offer direct access to data, but gives contact information for other investigators and a brief description of their research.
- KIDS COUNT is an online database designed "to track the status of children in the U.S." While the focus is on children, the data may be of use in many areas of sociology. There are four different databases hosted on the site. Measures include items like infant mortality, teen birth rate, high-school dropouts, income, parental employment, education etc. They are in the process of implementing a common web interface and set of capabilities across those data sets.
- Interesting statistics are for instance used in this exercise module on juvenile delinquency, which incorporates some interesting statistics, maps and rankings, allows the creation of graphs and engages students in hands-on data analysis in a form of a class assignment. It also enables Excel data downloads and the same link instructs students how to use Excel to carry out statistical analyses. The whole assignment is quite advanced in its logic, but requires no prior knowledge of statistical software, because every analytic step can be performed on-line with the offered and linked tools. Basic familiarity with statistics at the very elementary level (e.g. at the level of M18, which is required in the sociology department) would be good, but the terms and concepts are explained in the exercise.
- Another interesting analytic assignment deals with child mortality from accidents, homicide or suicide. As in the previous case, this assignment also uses a multiplicity of embedded tools available from its homepage including graphs and state rankings; in Excel embedded analytic tools also available on-line. Very instructive and rich.
- SSDAN offers many ready-to-use exercise modules and class assignments. They usually require little previous knowledge of statistics or statistical software. Many of the modules use StudentCHIP software (or its freeware equivalent - WebCHIP; you can learn more about both of them here. You can also consult the producer-provided manual or consult our brief tutorial created to document some differences between StudentCHIP and WebCHIP). Some of the modules most relevant to sociology of deviance include:
- Fear of crime and victimization , uses General Social Survey data and the GSS on-line analytic tools. Walks the student through all steps including how to analyze the necessary GSS variables on-line. It also actual statistics from the BJS and links it to results based on survey data, nonetheless it is rather simple.
- Correlates of Desistance , i.e. the process of discontinuation of criminal activity. The exercise module employs Census data and describes trends in the correlates of desistance and leads students to speculate about the consequences of these trends for the actual desistance process.
- Note: If you plan to have students do the exercise using WebCHIP (more), note that data files provided on the internet have been updated to include 2000 census data and their names have been changed as well. So, instead of data files “marr5090.dat” and “edoc5090.dat”, there are files “marr502k.dat” and “edoc502k.dat”. Everything else remains as before.
- Note 2: We believe that the exercise provides a faulty description of variable labels. On page 1 the categories of occupation should be “top white collar”, “other white collar”, “service”, and “blue collar”. Also emphasize to students that some data sets contain only a subset of the US adult population in a given year, such as employed adults in part B.
- Crime in America is a data analysis assignment by Russell Long at Delmar College that uses data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR). Students are provided with data tables and are asked to create graphs, analyze results, and discuss findings about concentrations of crime in different parts of the United States. Includes helpful guidelines for using Excel to create graphs.
- Site for Instructional Materials and Information offers a number of exercise modules for classroom use. SIMI is an initiative of ICPSR designed to disseminate resources for undergraduate and graduate education. Contains about 55 (as of April 2004) teaching modules, most of them quite advanced. Contains downloadable data files in various formats (STATA, SPSS, etc.), references to literature and more. Examples include:
- Domestic Violence Teaching Package uses a subset of the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators II data on national attributes and domestic violence for 136 nations during the period 1955-1964. Useful particularly for quantitative aggregate analyses. Data are provided in five-year periods for the economic, political, and social characteristics of the nations. Includes a codebook in PDF format and a data file in a card image format for download.
This section serves faculty teaching classes in the area of Deviance and Deviant Behavior to store their class and lecture materials, so that they can be easily shared, updated, and exchanged. Consult these brief guidelines explaining how to use this section of the page. If you are looking for a specific document, note that you might also find it on other topic-specific pages, or in the general repository of lecture materials
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Last edited Tuesday, 22 June 2004 at 14:45 by mk
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