INTRODUCTION
Researching Criminal Justice presents the results of a survey carried out in June, July and August 1996. A questionnaire was circulated to major institutions and people known to be doing social science research in areas related to the Criminal Justice system. It asked for details of completed research from the past ten years and of work in progress. Two hundred and fifty eight projects and more than 550 planned or existing reports are covered in this first publication. The material is presented without annotation, "in the words of the contributors".
INFORMATION STRUCTURE
It proved difficult to develop a questionnaire (and thus publication structure) which could cope equally well with the varying status of research projects (completed and in progress) and of reports (completed and not completed, published and unpublished). The format decided on is presentation by research project, with information on the resulting books and reports being presented subsidiary to each research project entry; information about each book is in normal bibliographic style, each with its own description and keywords. Many thanks for their patience to those contributors who had to squeeze their responses into this format.
Example:
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(research project title) |
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(books and reports) |
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I250.1 Parole decisions of district prisons boards |
I250.2 Monitoring the innovations of the Criminal Justice Act (1985) |
Each project has a code number beginning with a letter of the alphabet. Each letter of the alphabet represents an area of the criminal justice sector. For example, A = CHILDREN AND YOUTH, I = PRISONS AND INMATES. There are eleven such capital letters.
APPENDICES
Appendix: Bibliographic References, contains entries with X codings. These entries refer to publications found in library searches and other bibliographic sources for which we did not receive completed question-naires. These entries are NOT included in the RCJFind search programme and should be separately consulted in this document.
Appendix: List of Reports and Publications is an alphabetical list of books and report titles from the document (including Appendix: Bibliographic References entries).
Appendix: Qusetionnaire is the questionnaire used for the survey. Please use a printout of this questionnaire if you would like to provide extra information about existing entries, or information about other research projects for inclusion in later revisions of "Researching Criminal Justice".
EDITORIAL POLICY
The underlying principle of the survey was to present information on research projects and their reports "in the words of the contributors". Editorial contribution has thus been minimal; editorial changes are always marked by square brackets [ ]. Unmarked editorial changes are mainly matters of spelling and punctuation consistency.
NOTES
In 1995 the Department of Justice was restructured into three organisations, the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Corrections and the Department for Courts.
The Children's and Young Person's Service of the Department of Social Welfare is known as CYPS, but has recently changed to Children, Young Persons and their Families Service (CYPFS).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our thanks go to all the contributors to this Directory, most particularly to the researchers and representatives of large organisations and research projects who gave considerable time to providing us with information. Judy Paulin, Senior Researcher at the Ministry of Justice has overseen this project and provided invaluable assistance, direction and comment at all stages of the work.
David Guerin
Editor
November 1996
UPDATING - AN INVITATION
For this Directory to be of maximum usefulness for researchers, institutions and librarians, updating will be of the greatest importance. It is hoped that yearly updates will be produced. Contributions are invited at any time from anyone working in the area. Letting us know about new projects, and old ones you think should be included, will help us know whether an update would be of value. It would be particularly useful to hear about "in progress" work progressing to "completed", and about the publication of each report and journal article that you are involved with.
If you would like to suggest emendations to the existing Directory, please quote the appropriate reference number. If you wish to contribute information about other research projects, please be sure to use the Questionnaire, included as Appendix: Questionnaire.
Please post your comments and contributions to:
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Phone: (04) 494-9860
Fax: (04) 494-9917 e-mail: reception@justice.govt.nz |
