Suchergebnisse

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Social Reality of Crime (Quinney 1970a), the November 2010 Meeting of the American Society of Criminology in San Francisco featured a panel to discuss the legacy and continuing relevance of this pathbreaking book. In conclusion, it is clear that understanding social reactions to crime -- from which harms are criminalized to which crime control policies the public supports -- will be incomplete unless people are attuned to the ways in which social reality is constructed. In The Social Reality of Crime, Richard laid the foundation for a rich line of inquiry that remains as salient today as it was 40 years ago. Again, the author invites all criminologists, including his younger colleagues who are less familiar with this criminological classic, to consult Richard's book and, as he has, to draw important lessons from its pages. Adapted from the source document.

Utilizing a theoretical perspective (the "social supports model") increasingly applied by stress researchers in other fields, the present endeavor explores whether social supports operate to shield officers from the stresses emanating from police work To investigate this issue, 91 suburban officers were administered a questionnaire that contained scales measuring four job‐related stressors, four types of social supports, and two forms of psychological stress—work and life. With regard to the stressors, the data analysis revealed that feelings of dangerousness were significantly and positively related to both stress scales, while shift change and court problems increased only general lye stress. It was also found that supervisory support mitigates work stress while family support helps to reduce more general psychological discomfort. These latter results rein force the assertion that future research could profit by systematically exploring the circumstances, such as social supports, which enable police to cope effectively with the more stressful features of their work.

Miethe (1982) has recently argued that the consistent findings of wide‐spread consensus in the rankings of the seriousness of crimes may be more a rejection of the methodological approaches used by past researchers than of actual public sentiments. Building on Miethe's insights, this paper examines the extent to which the nature of the techniques employed to analyze data influences seriousness evaluations. The results indicate that consensus is affected by such factors as the rating task given to the subjects, how consensus is measured, and the type of offense under investigation. In turn these methodological considerations caution against using existing research as the bask either for the verification of consensus theories of justice or for the formulation of sanctioning policy.