Criminal Psychology in Action provides a practical, hands-on introduction to criminal psychology through unique projects for students, illustrating the many ways research into crimes and criminals can be conducted. It also provides an overview of many individual and social psychological theories of criminality.
Drawing on over half a century of experience supervising hundreds of projects at undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels, David Canter provides well-grounded and detailed guidance for students of how to conduct a range of relevant and interesting projects designed to engage students directly with empirical research. This includes consideration of the ethical and practical issues of doing research in this area, as well as examples of documents needed for informed consent and submissions to ethical committees. The range of research designs described – laboratory experiments, surveys, case studies and simulations – provide introductions to methodologies relevant to many other areas of research beyond criminal psychology.
Both engaging and interactive, this is an invaluable resource for instructors and students from colleges and universities around the world in many different fields, such as psychology, criminology, and socio-legal studies. It will also be of interest to all those who want to know more about the psychology of crime and criminality.
Section One: Challenges and Concerns when Studying Crimes and Criminals Section Two: Approaches to Research Section Three: Projects Project 1: How to Forge a Signature Project 2: Detecting Deception Project 3: Profiling Serial Killers Project 4: Geographical Offender Profiling Project 5: Exploring Crime Seriousness Project 6: The Seductions of Crime Project 7: How Fraudsters Persuade Project 8: Justifications for Criminality Project 9: How to Rob a Bank Project 10: Exploring Criminal Networks Section Four: Summary and Conclusions
Biography
David Canter Emeritus Professor at The University of Liverpool is highly regarded internationally for his research and many publications in Forensic Psychology. He created the field of Investigative Psychology and earlier developed Environmental Psychology. He has supervised research projects for over half a century, at every level from schools to PhDs, as well as large-scale studies for government departments, industry, and research councils.
“I am very happy to recommend this book, which contains detailed practical advice about how to carry out research projects in criminal psychology. It should appeal particularly to forensic psychology and criminology students, but everyone who is interested criminal behaviour will derive useful information from it.”
David Farrington, Cambridge University, UK
“David Canter reveals his experience as a seasoned, practicing social scientist by embracing ‘the value of doing science, rather than just reading about it’. The ten fascinating projects in this book encapsulate the lifeblood of crime psychology”.
Benjamin Baughman, Cannon University, USA
“David Canter’s expertise shines through this book. A good deal of the material – notably the projects on forgery, fraud, and geographical profiling – will, I’m sure, interest crime writers and all those interested in true crime, and perhaps surprise them.”
Martin Edwards, Crime writer, former Chair of the Crime Writers Association
“This book is great! It poses some interesting and complex ideas while being easy to understand.”
Rosie Jacobs, Sixth Form (High School) student, UK
“This book is easy to read and provides a lot of useful and easy to understand details of how to carry out projects and make sense of the results. These are things that I had to learn over a period of time, from here and there, that would mostly use maths jargon. Seeing it all in one place makes it significantly easier.”
Miraslava Yaneva, MSc student UK
