Juvenile Justice System and Sentencing
This is an excerpt from the paper...
The social issue being studied in the article is the criteria that judges in the juvenile justice system use to sentence juveniles who commit serious crimes. The problem arises because of the authors' assessment that studies of juvenile sentencing have either consisted of nonrepresentative samples or have not taken into account enough variables to make their evaluations of sentencing practices truly informative. In addition, very little research appears to have been done on juvenile offenders who commit felony crimes. Accordingly, the research problem is to identify variables that inform judges' sentencing criteria--including but not limited to the profiles of the offender and the crime, which appear to have dominated most studies of juvenile-case disposition in the past--in order to determine the reasons for which judges dispose of their cases.There was a clearly developed research design to this study. That is because it sought data input from primary sources of sentencing: the judges themselves. In the background of the decision to accumulate data by that method was the authors' critique of previous studies of juvenile court sentencing practices. They cite multiple limitations on establishing independent variables from which valid inferences might be drawn. For example, using race, sex, and social demographic information in conjunction with disposition records may "indicate what sentences have been handed down, [but] they may be less useful for u
. . .
t the initial questionnaires from the state agency governing youth services and did follow-up mailings to encourage respondents to participate in the study. The content of the survey, which had a so-called factorial survey design, asked respondents to evaluate (fictional) vignettes with complex characteristics and declare how they would dispose of a case. Factorial vignettes are structured around attributes (levels) from variables, or dimensions. These are randomly selected to construct the vignette, which enables objective statistical measurement of results.
The vignettes were the main independent variables, and within them were randomly selected characteristics of the fictional offense, the attributes of the offenders, and the attributes of the juvenile social service system. In order not to skew perceptions, all vignette offenders were male, and race and social class were not part of the presentation. The dependent variable was the response to the question of how likely the judge commit the youth to a state facility.
For all of these reasons, the study design appears to have had integrity, and the data could all be plugged in to a statistical analysis.
The Findings
The data were summarized based on two statistical analyses:
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
, June Individualization, independent variables, Justice Quarterly, Moon MM, race sex, studies juvenile, juvenile court, factorial survey design, evaluate fictional vignettes, juvenile-court judges ohio, survey design, fictional vignettes, evaluate fictional, dependent variable, judges themselves, factorial survey,
Approximate Word count = 1304
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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