Title	The Structure of Criminological Theory
Creator	Brantingham, P. Jeffrey
Publisher	Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery
Date Issued	2019-03-18T09:40
Description	Criminology over the past 100 years can be criticized in general for barely increasing our ability to explain crime. However, this general criticism glosses over significant differences between what Robert Merton identified as low-, middle and high-range theories. Low-range theories are can be described as 'empirical laws', while high-range theories are are grand unifying concepts. Middle-range theories are principles--perhaps law-like statements in themselves--that aggregate empirical laws and are subsumed by high-range theories. This paper surveys explanation at each of these levels and argues that we do quite well with explanation at the scale of empirical laws, but still struggle with grand unifying concepts. Mathematics has the greatest potential to contribute in framing middle-range theory, which we can hope will make high-range theory more tractable.
Extent	35.0 minutes
Subject	Mathematics; Game theory, economics, social and behavioral sciences; Computer science
Type	Moving Image
File Format	video/mp4
Language	eng
Notes	Author affiliation: UCLA Department of Anthropology
Series	BIRS Workshop Lecture Videos (Banff, Alta)
Date Available	2019-09-15
Provider	Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Rights	Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
DOI	10.14288/1.0380878
URI	http://hdl.handle.net/2429/71678
Affiliation	Non UBC
Peer Review Status	Unreviewed
Scholarly Level	Faculty
Rights URI	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Aggregated Source Repository	DSpace

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