Descriptive and Inferential Statistics Analysis Project

Hypothesis:

When Drug Offenders admit to sufficient facts of the case the criminal justice fails to place them into detention. Talk about how even when a defendant takes a plea simply admitting to the case the defendant is not even placed into detention as the rates show less than 50 percent are placed in jail. Talk about how whites/blacks are defendants with blacks being a little higher. Add the graph that shows how taking a plea results in.

Overview

The purpose of the Analysis Project is to capstone the second-half of the semester, which focuses on various forms of hypothesis testing. The objectives of this project are for you to demonstrate your understanding of these techniques by applying and interpreting them to a dataset. I will provide you with several candidate datasets to choose from – I have tried to accommodate different areas of criminology and criminal justice in the datasets available. You must choose one dataset and test at least two hypotheses using the available variables. Your completed project should take the form of a report, with an introduction/literature review, descriptive statistics, hypothesis tests, and interpretation of results.
Instructions

Take a look at the available datasets and the variables within. Feel free to check in with me via Course Mail to identify the dataset you have chosen and some candidate hypotheses you will consider testing – I’d be happy to give feedback. You must test at least two hypotheses to test. The datasets I have made available are…1
a. Communities and Crime (N = 333): A community-level dataset (from Michigan) with variables for violent crime rates, police strength, and socio-economic indicators.

b. Terrorist Activity 2001-2015 (N = 116): A country-level dataset (created from the Global Terrorism Database and the World Bank) detailing active terrorist groups, attacks, and kills from 2001-2015. It also includes relevant socio-economic and political variables.
c. Parolee Recidivism (N = 1,917): An individual-level dataset detailing the characteristics of parolees and whether they were rearrested within 2 years of release.
d. Sentencing of Drug Offenders (N = 6,532): An individual-level dataset detailing the characteristics of defendants, their offenses, their criminal histories, and sentence severity.

e. Attitudes Towards Crime and Criminal Justice (N = 469): An individual- level dataset featuring a subsample of the General Social Survey. Questions consider respondent socio-demographics, and their opinions on the criminal justice system.

Your analysis project should consist of the following sections (also see Grading Rubric on the last page):

a. Introduction/Literature Review (5pts): Provide an introduction to your project which discusses the hypotheses you will test. This section should draw on peer-reviewed scholarly literature and empirical sources (i.e., government reports) to address 1) why these are worthwhile hypotheses to consider, and 2) what previous research has found about the relationships that you will examine. This section should be 4-5 double spaced pages and you should seek to draw on at least 8 unique sources.
b. Descriptive Statistics (5pts): Using a combination of tables and figures, present relevant descriptive statistics for the variables under consideration. These should consist of the most appropriate measures of central tendency and dispersion, and appropriate figures such as histograms or boxplots.
c. Hypothesis Tests (10pts): This is the heart of the project. In this section you must apply the appropriate hypothesis tests given the hypotheses you are considering. For each hypothesis, provide 1) the null and alternative hypotheses, 2) a justification for why you are using a particular test (i.e., justify why a t-test or ANOVA would be appropriate), and 3) display the results of your tests in one or more tables. This should include relevant quantities including group means, test statistics, and p-values (i.e., “Sig” in SPSS).
d. Interpretation of Results (5pts): Finally, provide an interpretation of your results, including the statistical conclusion (i.e., was the null hypothesis rejected or retained?), and the substantive conclusion (i.e., what do the tests tell you able the associations between the variables you are considering? This section should be approximately 2 double-spaced pages.

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Descriptive and Inferential Statistics Analysis Project