Web Exercises

  1. Go to the INFOMINE Scholarly Internet Resource Collections website at https://www.loc.gov/item/2003629616/. Search for five resources containing information on crime or victimization. Briefly describe your sources and list the websites where they can be found. How do these sources of information differ in their approaches to collecting information? Do they report the sampling information? What statistics do they present? Do they report the sampling method used in the studies from which they obtained these statistics? What sampling methods were used? Evaluate the sampling methods in terms of representativeness and generalizability. How would you improve on the sampling methods to increase the representativeness and generalizability of the data? If no sampling methods are mentioned, propose one that would have been appropriate to obtain the statistics.
  2. Explore some of the data sets collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics: https://www.bjs.gov/. Select a data set and describe the sampling procedures used to collect the data.
  3. Go to http://www.gallup.com/home.aspx and search for information about Gallup’s polling practices. Write a short summary of describing how Gallup collects information on topics of interest.