Practice Activity: Research, Exercising discretion in criminal

8-3 Practice Activity: Research Questions

Overview

In this assignment, you will create a research question to add to your ePortfolio.

Prompt

In your final course in the criminal justice program, you will create a research question that you will then investigate further. To assist you in this task, review the following list of current research topics covered in each course. Choose one of those topics (or another topic covered in this course) and create one to three research questions based on that topic. Then, submit the questions to your instructor.

This research question assignment is graded based on completion, and instructor feedback should help you strengthen your questions for future use. After you have submitted the questions to your instructor, upload them (and the list of potential topics below, if you wish) to your ePortfolio PDF.

For more information on creating research questions, refer to this research resource from the Shapiro Library. This page also has a helpful FAQ section on research-question creation and expectations that you may want to explore further.

Topics:

• Exercising discretion in criminal justice decision making
• Decision-making process and discretion
• Integrity, authority, and discretionary power
• Morality in the decision-making process
• Discretionary decisions made by criminal justice professionals
• Discretionary decisions in the different branches of criminal justice
• Aspects of discretionary laws
• Objective summaries
• Discovery and discretion
• Agency’s culture
• Amount of discretion and decision-making process
• Internal and external decision making

Specifically, the following rubric criteria must be addressed:

• Submit one to three research questions based on a topic covered in this course.

Guidelines for Submission

This assignment must be completed in written format.