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Week 6 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 6 — Counting Crime: Rates, Surveys, and the Reporting Effect — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Sociology Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 6 of the term — turn crime counts into rates, read a victimization survey for what it does and does not show, and explain to someone outside sociology why "reported crime went up" and "crime went up" are different claims.

This week you learned how deviance differs from crime, how groups keep order through informal and formal social control, how Durkheim, Merton, the conflict account, and the interactionists explain rule-breaking, and how to read crime data. In Week 1 you learned to compare places by rate rather than by count, and in Week 2 you learned to read any figure four ways; this week you use both habits on crime data. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain a finding to someone who has never studied sociology. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Sociology in Action Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will use these figures, all from this week's chapter:

  • The two-town example (illustrative, constructed for this course, not real data): Town A records 12 crimes among 40,000 residents in one year, which is 30 per 100,000; Town B records 15 crimes among 30,000 residents in the same year, which is 50 per 100,000.
  • The Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey for 2024: 23.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, of which 11.2 per 1,000 were reported to police.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

  1. In the illustrative two-town example, Town A records 12 crimes among 40,000 residents in one year. What is Town A's crime rate per 100,000 residents?
  2. In the illustrative two-town example, Town B's crime rate is 50 per 100,000 residents and Town A's is 30 per 100,000. By how many crimes per 100,000 residents does Town B's rate exceed Town A's?
  3. In the 2024 National Crime Victimization Survey, there were 23.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, and 11.2 per 1,000 were reported to police. How many violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older were not reported to police?
  4. The 2024 National Crime Victimization Survey rate was 23.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older. What is that same rate per 100,000 persons age 12 or older?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation of what that value shows and one limit of it. For problem 1, say what the rate measures and what its base is, and explain why you compare towns by rate rather than by count. For problem 2, say what the difference shows about the two towns, name one thing it does not show about any one resident, and say whether the comparison is a correlation, a cause, or neither. For problem 3, say what the not-reported figure shows about police records, explain the reporting effect in your own words, and name one thing the figure does not show. For problem 4, explain why the base must be written out every time, and why 23.3 per 1,000 does not mean 23.3 percent of people.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your neighbor has never studied sociology and posts in a neighborhood group: "Reported crime here jumped after the city launched its new reporting app. Our town is getting more dangerous." Write a 3–5 sentence reply to your neighbor that explains in everyday words why a rise in reported crime and a rise in crime are different claims, says what a victimization survey adds that police records cannot, uses the 2024 survey's 23.3 and 11.2 per 1,000 as an example of how much crime never reaches police, and names one limit, such as that the survey covers people age 12 or older or that one year shows no trend. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one accurate reply can be defensible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a public library manager who sees "lost item" reports double after adding an online form and worries, "Patrons are losing far more things than before." Model answer: "I'd say the form may have changed the count more than the losses. Before, a patron had to find a staff member to report a lost umbrella, so many never bothered; now it takes a minute online. To know whether more things are really being lost, we would need a second source, such as asking a sample of patrons directly. The limit is that a quick survey of patrons also depends on what people remember and choose to say."

Use that pattern for your reply to your neighbor, with your own explanation and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single data-reading report containing:

  • the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and a brief interpretation of what that value shows and one limit of it;
  • your reply to your neighbor, explaining why a rise in reported crime and a rise in crime are different claims, what a victimization survey adds, and one limit; and
  • a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled diagram of the two towns' rates and the survey's two rates with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's numbers, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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