Introduction

Abstract

Quantitative methods are at the heart of social science research generally, and in criminology/criminal justice in particular. Since the discipline’s birth, researchers have employed a variety of quantitative methods to describe the origins, patterning, and response to crime and criminal activity, and this line of research has generated important descriptive information that has formed the basis for many criminological/criminal justice theories and public policies. And in the past quarter-century, the advent and expansion of computers and advanced software applications has led to a burgeoning of methodological and statistical tools that have been put to use to address many criminological/criminal justice research issues. In short, the field of quantitative criminology now routinely employs quantitative techniques of all levels of complexity, not only to deal with the advances in longitudinal, experimental, and multilevel data structures but also to study substantive methodological or evaluative concerns of interest in the criminological/criminal justice community.

Unfortunately, many of the quantitative methods used in criminology/criminal justice have tended to appear in journal articles and book chapters such that a handbook-oriented reference guide has not existed that contains, in one volume, many of the important contemporary quantitative methods employed in criminology/criminal justice, especially those that have been developed to study difficult criminological questions, which have been previously examined using limited and/or inappropriate methodologies applied to particular types of data structures.