The use of qualitative methods and practitioners-as-authors in journal publications of police research

Abstract

Two areas of criminology and criminal justice research (CCJ) receive regular attention in the academic literature – the underutilization of qualitative methods and the proper role of research in policy. This paper advances the understanding of both of these issues in the field of police scholarship. It presents the results of content and chi-square analyses of 88 empirical studies of US police published in top policing and CCJ journals. This study finds that the top policing and CCJ journals publish articles that use qualitative methods at vastly disproportionate rates than those using quantitative methods. Police-specific journals publish articles using mixed methods at a higher rate than CCJ journals. Data on practitioners-as-authors, articles’ funding sources and topics, and levels of law enforcement studied also inform considerations for police practitioners, police researchers, and collaborations between them.

Keywords:

• research methods
• qualitative–quantitative debate
• mixed methods
• researcher–practitioner collaborations

Acknowledgements

The author kindly thanks Drs. Gary Cordner and Maria Tcherni and the anonymous reviewers for their expeditious and thoughtful comments on early drafts of this paper. The author maintains sole ownership over any omissions, mistakes, or confusions the reader encounters while reading this paper.

Notes

1. Editors of Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice (vol. 4, issue 2, 2010), Criminology and Public Policy (vol. 9, issue 4, 2010), and Police Practice and Research (vol. 11, issue 2, 2009) have recently devoted significant amounts of space to the first matter. To the latter, in 2010 the Journal of Criminal Justice Education published one issue on qualitative methods (vol. 21, issue 4) and another on the use of quantitative methods (vol. 21, issue 2) in criminal justice and criminology research.

2. Policing: An International Journal of Police Science and Management is the product of merging the two no longer published journals, American Journal of Police and Police Studies.

3. These categories are borrowed from Beckman et al. (2003) and Mazeika et al. (2010).

4. This article is included in the sample because it employed systematic social observation of police–citizen interactions to determine citizen compliance and demeanor. This method of studying citizen satisfaction differs from the commonly used method of surveys of citizens, which often do not require any data being collected specifically from police sources.