Forensic Psychology Is a \'Practical,\'

¶ … forensic psychology is a 'practical,' not a theoretical discipline, research is required to justify the approaches used to discover information about crime and the prescriptions offered to policymakers about how to deal with crime There are three basic research designs used in forensic psychology: descriptive, correlational, and experimental. Descriptive research is often a preliminary investigation of a particular phenomenon. There is no formal hypothesis: the intention is fact-finding. "Descriptive research often involves collecting information through data review, surveys, interviews, or observation. This type of research best describes the way things are" (Kravitz 2013). For example, a survey might be used to determine the demographic features of juvenile delinquents who commit specific types of offenses. Descriptive research has great use during the beginning phases of research to determine what should be studied. It can narrow down a broad field of inquiry. However, it offers no guidance about why something is occurring and has little prescriptive value. Descriptive research answers questions about 'what' is happening, versus the 'why' something is occurring (Mitchell n.d.). However, the value of descriptive research should not be dismissed. For example, it might be determined that the crime rate in New York City is not going up, despite people's concerns that the city is less safe. The first step in creating change is to understand the realities of the situation.

In contrast, "correlational research attempts to determine how related two or more variables are," for example, if there is a direct relationship between being diagnosed with ADHD and delinquency (Kravitz 2013). Causation is not determined through this form of research, merely a positive or negative association between two variables. Correlations "do tell you whether 2 variables are related. But they do not tell you which variable influences which. They may hint or suggest that one variable influences another, but they are never proof of causality. That is, they are never proof that changes in variable a cause changes in variable B" (Mitchell n.d.). In fact, B might cause a, versus a causing B (a diagnosis of a learning disability might indicate a predisposition to delinquency, or delinquent behavior might make a student more apt to be identified as learning disabled, if a correlation between these factors has been established).