This book of original essays presents students with challenging looks at some of the most basic, and sometimes most difficult, decisions faced by criminal justice researchers. Each chapter presents an overview of a foundational question/issue in the conduct of research, and discussion of the options to resolve these controversies.

The reader is introduced to such basic questions as whether criminal justice research can and does affect social policy, whether a researcher should collect their own original data or draw on existing data sets, what types of approaches to use with interview subjects, and whether particular questions are best approached by quantitative or qualitative research methods. Each selection lays out the merits of various options and challenges students to critically think through their own solutions to each controversy.