What is your population of interest (who are the people you are interested in examining in your proposed study)? Students will want to make sure to provide an explanation for why the selected population is appropriate for addressing the research question.
Every day, people from different walks of life will commit a crime, but people defined by their demographics are more likely to break the law than others based on their background. Therefore, in most cases, a country’s demographics define criminal activities in society mainly because it tells of different people’s characteristics, thus teaching about the patterns of society. It is essential that criminologists use such factors to understand why crimes occur in a given location and why the given demographic group conducts crimes. Different demographics are defined by social class, race, age, and gender, which could be used to understand crime. In this research study, I am most interested in the college student population, a group that has been identified with an increasing rate of crimes performed. However, it is essential to consider that pursuing a college degree comes with a lot of outstanding performance pressure because the job market will only absorb those with excellent performance. Some college students could also be engaged with peer relations that negatively influence their attitude to think like and act like offenders.
Therefore, a college degree has been determined to the central investment for the students’ better future. Due to internal and external pressures to succeed, it sometimes is too much for the students so that some will prefer to engage in some other activities that could bring in this success in a much easier way. Therefore, the strain for educational success among college students causes a negative view of education’s purpose, thus negative emotions and, in the end, introduction to criminal coping mechanisms. In this case, college students drop out of school to engage in crimes and other substance use. In such a way, it will be possible to explain why most young adults have been arrested and others imprisoned without even completing their education in college. Besides, it is possible to relate to the individual age, and the rate of they are involved in crimes. For instance, the investigation statistics show that individuals of the ages 16 and 25 are most likely to be arrested.
How do you plan to select individuals for inclusion in your study? When addressing this question, students will want to provide an explanation as to why the selected sampling procedure is stronger than alternative procedures.
I will use the simple random sampling technique to access college students in several institutions. Having identified the population of interest as the college students, it will be possible to determine the sampling frame so that we only assess the specific group and reduce the potential biases caused by humans in selecting participants. In such a way, the data will only provide information data that represents the college students in the assumption of limited missing information. In this case, Fundamentally, not all identified college students could be willing to provide the required information because the research could seem unhelpful to them. Therefore, by using the simple random sampling technique will provide an opportunity to participate in every student. The information and data collected from the identified sample will be valid while identifying the population participants is simple. Besides, the sampling frame allows the generalization of inferences compared to all the probability sampling techniques. Luckily, today several software packages can be used to assist in random sample selection harnessing the simplicity of the sampling technique, which is the strength of this sampling method.