Texas State University
School of Criminal Justice
Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam for Research Methods
October 23, 2012
11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
DIRECTIONS: Choose Option One or Option Two. Save two electronic copies of your answer (one with
just your ID number assigned to you, the other with your ID number and name). Email both copies to
dv14@txstate.edu. Print out a hard copy as well with both your id number and name written on it.
Option 1
Earlier this year the national media was dominated by the story about a neighborhood
watchman (George Zimmerman) who shot and killed a teenager (Trayvon Martin). This is a
tragic event and the outcome of the case is far from settled. It is neither the first, nor the last,
time race and ethnicity will fuel controversy in criminal justice decision-making. Just prior to
the Zimmerman/Martin altercation there was another similar incident involving a Black officer
and a White suspect. These cases are very similar; however, the latter received almost no
media attention.
More than one criminal justice observer has asked whether the race and ethnicity of the officer
and suspect determine whether a case will be described as “racially motivated.” More
succinctly, is an officer/citizen contact involving a White officer and Black suspect more likely to
be perceived as racially motivated than an officer/citizen contact involving a Black officer and a
White suspect? Describe how you would design a study to answer this question. In your
response:
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Identify and justify the specific research method (e.g. survey, interviews, experiment,
etc.) you will use,
Describe and justify your sampling strategy,
State your null and alternative hypotheses,
Identify and justify the variables you will use, including their conceptual definitions and
how you intend to operationalize them,
Identify the potential threats to validity and reliability and how you intend to mitigate
them in your study,
Briefly describe and justify how you intend to analyze the data, and
Identify any potential ethical issues you may encounter, in particular those involving the
protection of human subjects, and how you might avoid them.
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Option 2
Read the summary of the Terrill & Paoline study (below) and answer the questions listed below.
Terrill and Paoline (2011) published a study that compared the injury rates when Conducted
Energy Devices (CEDs, a.k.a. Tasers) were used with the rates of injury when other use of force options
were used. The study was conducted using data from 8 mid-to-large size police departments from
across the United States. The data included 13,913 use of force incidents and citizen injury occurred in
4,447 (31.9%) of these incidents. These data were taken from agency use of force reports over a twoyear period.
The dependent variable was citizen injury, and this was coded in three different ways. The first
was a dichotomous injury/no injury measure. The second was an ordinal scale that assessed the
severity of the injury (no injury, bruises/abrasions, lacerations, broken bones). If the Taser probe
punctured the skin of a citizen, this was coded as a laceration. If the Taser was used to drive stun the
citizen (i.e. the citizen was touched with the CED rather than being shot with the probes) and this left a
mark, this injury was coded as a bruise/abrasion. The third variable was also an ordinal measure that
assessed the severity of injury based upon hospitalization (no injury, injury but not transported to
hospital, injury and transported to the hospital). Sub-categorizations of these variables were also
created, but are not important here.
The primary independent variable was type of force used. A series of dichotomous variables
were used to create a classification system. The “CED only” variable was coded as a 1 when the CED and
no other force was used. The “CED with other” variable was coded as a 1 when CED and some other
force was utilized, and the “CED none” variable was coded as 1 when other force was used, but a CED
was not. A series of control variables for various demographic factors and the specific city were also
included. Level of citizen resistance was additionally included in the models.
The results indicated that people were approximately 1.5 to 2.0 times more likely to be injured
when a Taser was used (controlling for the other variables in the study). This is in direct conflict with
other results on CED injuries. These other studies did not code the puncturing of the skin by a Taser
probe or a mark left by a drive stun as injuries. The other studies argued that, because the Taser was
functioning as it was designed when these events occurred, these types of marks should not be coded as
injuries.
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Identify problems unique to using secondary datasets.
Identify any threats to internal validity and strategies one may use in a replication to
mitigate.
Identify external validity threats, how it occurs in this study and possible ways to
mitigate in future replications.
Discuss the concept “citizen injury,” how it was measured and alternate measures that
could have been used to improve the measurement of this concept.
Discuss key ethical concepts the researcher may have encountered in presenting this
research to the IRB and how it may have been presented to the IRB.
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