Dissertation on Influences of Crime!!!

format_quote Originally Posted by paradise786

Im doing a dissertation on influences of crime taking into consideration, parenting, environemnt, media and music etc but I wanted to focus on theories such as behaviourism, social learning theory etc but I need help finding sources can anyone advise me or point out useful websites and book, I will really appreciate it!

TRY not to include too many things else your dissertation will get out of hand. I would suggest you write down a list of various theories and then just use Wikipedia - NOW the key thing here is when you get to Wikipedia have a look to see how many references there are at the end (many will be books) - the more the better because those can be followed up by you and also they give a rough measure of how valuable that entry is. If there are very few refs then the whole entry is suspect.

Once you have done a preliminary study choose one or at most two theories and 5 or 6 factors at most and use those to focus your dissertation - be warned, its very easy to think you can do everything but you will so find to your cost that you cannot so go to it. (See my Research Methods thread)




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Search for influence on crime and books on influence on crime. You can go to the library and ask the librarian. They may be able to help.

When you're researching, read as much as you can until you know enough to be able to write on your own. you may have to read each topic several times. However, make sure you take references, so you can include them in at the end of your dissertion. When taking notes, include book title and page number or article URL, etc.

I agree with what Hugo said about making sure you do not include too many things. You may want to narrow down your focus to just one thing: The influence of Parenting on crime. Within that you can look at parenting style (authoritative, authoritarian, etc.), attachment theories, absentee parents (i.e. absentee father), etc.

I disagree with Hugo on wikipedia. I would only use wikipedia as a springboard to give you a rough overview and examples of avenues to explore. You can seek out the sources at the bottom to use. It is always best to use primary sources, if possible. I would not use wikipedia as a reference for your paper. On my other computer I have an entire list of search engines on the web, but I can not access it right now. One place you can do your searches is through google scholar. http://scholar.google.com/

Instead of books, because of the type of information you are looking for, and potential time restraints you may have, I'd look for research articles. For example: search google scholar for crime AND attachment style : http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=...001&as_sdtp=on

If you scroll down the list you can see sme articles that would fit with what you might be interested in including in your paper. BUT you may not be able to find many full text articles on-line. This is where you will need to write down the references and either search your University library, or else request them through interlibrary loan. You also can see what search engines your university library has (such as PsychInfo) and search for full text articles in there.