Hadar Aviram

What Would You Do? Conducting Web-Based Factorial Vignette Surveys

Factorial vignette studies combine survey methodologies with an experimental research design, and allow researchers to examine subjects’ reactions to hypothetical scenarios (vignettes) while controlling for variables within the scenarios. Slightly different versions of the vignettes are randomly assigned to respondents. This chapter guides readers through the necessary steps to craft, administer, and analyze a factorial survey. After first assessing the suitability of a factorial vignette design to the topic, researcher should settle on the number of variables according to budget constraints, and then craft realistic vignettes with multiple versions according to the number of variables. This chapter provides guidelines as to programming the survey, sampling populations, and administration of the survey. Finally, it examines the presentation of findings and the typical limitations of a factorial study.

The Correctional Hunger Games Understanding Realignment in the Context of the Great Recession

The California Criminal Justice Realignment is often seen as a sui generis penal experiment in response to a court mandate. However, when examined in a broader context, it can be understood as part of a recession-era institutional effort to reduce prison costs, fueled by a discourse of austerity and financial prudence, which I refer to as “humonetarian.” This article examines Realignment, its predecessor, Senate Bill 18, and its successor, Proposition 47, as examples of humonetarian policy, characterized by a rhetoric of costs and savings; bipartisan support; inmate transference practices; and a focus on nonviolent, low-risk offenders, whose incarceration expenses exceed the risk they pose. The analysis yields two insights: one, the financial context of reform; and the other, the unique, neopopulist California “flavor” of this financial context, which stands in the way of even more effective reform. I end with thoughts about the promise and perils of humonetarianism in the California context.

Mass atrocity and criminology

The fact that the mass atrocities in Darfur have been largely hidden from the public eye, and would have remained so despite a large-scale survey funded by the US government, is a painful illustration of the neglect of Africa by the West. Given the historical debt owed by the West to various ethnic peoples whose community devastation has been ignored, unacknowledged, or downplayed, until it was far too late, one cannot underestimate the importance of Hagan and Rymond-Richmond’s scholarly and humanitarian project. It would have been an immensely important and valuable contribution even had its sole focus been to bring this survey to the academic community’s attention, after it lay buried and unused for years. Rescuing this valuable (and expensive) data set, and particularly providing us with the horrifying eyewitness accounts of the massacres performed by government agents and by the Janjaweed militia, is in itself a sacred task; the careful and sophisticated quantitative analysis provided in the appendix is extremely important. The book, however, sets out to do substantially more than that, and engages, simultaneously, in several enterprises. First, it provides an intellectual history of the engagement of the criminological discipline with international war crimes. Second, it makes a case for the necessity of systematic criminological research on the topic, providing several ways in which criminology could be a useful addition to the discourse. These include the ability to provide a methodological counterpart to public health research, highlighting the special case of death-toll assessment; a comprehensive theory of genocide based on collective action; and a set of tools for a systematic proof of racial motives through the documentation of racial epithets used during attacks. Finally, the book aims at broadening the discussion framework to include genocide in a more general criminological inquiry into exclusionary and inclusionary approaches and their violent and criminal repercussions. Theoretical Criminology