Posted: August 1st, 2023

The Decision To End Abusive Relationships

You should begin by stating what the article sets out to demonstrate or what question(s) it addresses. So begin by noting:
What is the purpose of the research?
What hypotheses are the researchers examining, or what questions are they trying to answer?

Your review can comment briefly on the strengths of the study, but most of the review should focus on its limitations, particularly on problems with the research design, including measurement, sampling, data analysis, reporting of the findings, the interpretations of the findings and the conclusions. Do keep in mind, however, that all research has limitations (e.g. any study can only analyze data from a particular time period or population). Therefore, your review should focus on those methodological problems that place important limits on the conclusions that can be drawn from the research. Don’t just identify those problems; you need to also indicate how those problems might affect the conclusions. If there are realistic ways in which the study could have been done that would have avoided these problems, you could note these. Thinking about alternative ways the study could have been done to more adequately answer the questions it poses may be a useful way of identifying the article’s limitations.

The following questions may help you identify limitations with an article. Not all of these points will apply to each article, as such, do not attempt to address all of these questions in any one review. It’s better to have a well-developed, focused discussion of some of the major limitations rather than a listing of all the problems you can think of.

How do the researchers operationalize their concepts? Consider both the independent variable and the dependent variable. Do the ways these variables are measured make sense in terms of the concepts they are designed to measure?
Is the basic design of the study appropriate for drawing inferences about the phenomenon of interest? Or is there something about the manner in which the study was carried out that would make you concerned about the inferences that are drawn?
How important is it, in terms of the questions the article addresses, that the observations be of a representative sample? What population is this sample intended to be representative of? A representative sample may be important in some circumstances and not others.
Has the sampling of people or objects been carried out sensibly?
Are the appropriate comparisons made? (For example, if groups are being compared, are the groups really comparable on relevant dimensions?)
Are there possible artifacts that might explain the findings that are presented? (Think, in particular, about threats to internal validity.) In other words, are there alternative explanations for the findings that the authors do not consider? Are there other factors that might account for the findings that are not adequately addressed in the design or analysis?
How confident should we be in generalizing the findings?

When you are writing your review, think of it as a way to provide constructive criticism to the author – as if you were the editor of a journal and were giving authors advice on how to improve their articles. Try to distinguish between 1) problems that the authors could address by revising the way the article is written (e.g. perhaps the author’s conclusions need to be re-written or perhaps some further information or analysis should be added to address questions you have about sampling, measurement, alternative explanations for the findings, etc.) and 2) problems that are ‘fatal flaws’ because of the way the study was carried out – i.e. problems that would lead you, as a journal editor, to reject the paper as unpublishable even with revision. If the way the study was carried out is so fundamentally flawed that – short of doing the research all over again – there is no way the article could be revised for publication, you can say so. But even studies with a number of methodological problems may still allow us to draw some worthwhile – albeit limited – conclusions. Again, keep in mind when you are writing your reviews that no study is perfect.
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Criminology Journal Article Critique
“The Decision To End Abusive Relationships: The Role of Offender Characteristics” By Meghan S. Stroshine and Amanda L. Robinson

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The article points out the fact that while most of existing research has concentrated in the manner in which communities and criminal justice agencies are trying to intercede in a bid to break the domestic violence cycle, few researchers have focussed on identifying the factors considered in deciding to terminate an abusive relationship. To this effect, this research would focus on examining various offender characteristics relating to women trying to terminate abusive relationships. Its main objective was to add and synthesize its research findings on existing important literature of the factors compelling women to end the abusive relationships and also to provide valuable insight on how the advocates and researchers can offer assistance to the battered women.
Considering previous researchers have failed to examine the function of characteristics of offenders, the research was considered an exploratory study that used information obtained from the female victims of domestic violence. To determine the nature of these relationships in relation to the variables, bivariate and multivariate analyses would be conducted. The independent variables of the research study included indicators of abuse history, institutional response variables, offender characteristics, and control variables. The outcome variable constituted the dependent variable. These research’s variables were adequate in number and efficient predictors of the research subject. Considering that domestic violence can have numerous factors causing its existence and reasons for termination which depends on the particular women, the variables selected could be controlled or manipulated and did inform the research adequately in consideration of the sample used.
One of the methodological limitations of the study was that the research was limited in terms of the number of women that could be interviewed. The research could only interview a small group of the total population of women whose cases ended up in arrests, and the women who received assistance from the volunteer program would not be included. While this is a problem in many research studies, the sample captured in research must be representative of the real population in terms of their experiences in regards to the research variables. The sample may have failed to provide an accurate image of the situation on the ground, thus misleading any decisions and policies concerning this research issue and findings. In this way, the researcher should have considered secondary information from peer-reviewed sources to inform the research which would have increased the reliability of its conclusions.
The quantitative research methodology was incorporated in this study since the information that was collected from the interview questionnaires analyzed through the logistical regression analysis. The research would find that the fundamental predictors to women trying to terminate abusive relationships included offenders keeping weapons in respective residences and the existence of a formal criminal justice response to the violence. Violence is a social issue with extensive literature that has adopted qualitative research methodologies. This research needed to have considered the approach for its studies such that a mixed-method approach is incorporated rather than have one purely quantitative methodology for the research. Qualitative studies are fundamental in the decisions made to terminate abusive relationships, and their research findings have more readily amenable information. While the qualitative studies are limited in terms of the small samples used to provide in-depth information, the research should have considered numerous secondary qualitative studies also to inform their findings. The generalizability of its research findings would be more confident since it would easily apply in a broader group of women.
Considering this research was dealing with studying human behaviours, these studies will face additional and unexpected challenges that are related to human volunteers. These challenges include the volunteer’s motivation, mood, and other individual attitudes of the volunteer, which could affect their answers to the research interviews. It is the possibility of these research artefacts that emphasis on research involving human participants being an inherently social enterprise. In this way, proponents of critical social psychology indicate that methodological strategies such as discourse analysis would be more appropriate than experimentation to study psychological phenomena. Discourse analysis encompasses studying the written or spoken language in consideration of the social contexts. The investigation is focussed on understanding the utilization of language in real-life situations. The researchers could have incorporated the research to understand the responses given by the volunteers. Not only would the researcher gain more insight on a particular issue, but increased the confidence levels of their findings.
Nonetheless, the experimental method incorporated is useful in examining the causality questions. In this case, this research needed to have also concentrated on the potential of these research artefacts and incorporated particular measures to reduce their occurrence. Experiments with these strategies in mind would have increased the confidence of their result findings.

This research did remarkably ensure that it provides the fundamental role in offenders characteristics that affect women who are attempting to end abusive relationships. However, their limitations in research methodology and design do limit the generalizability of their findings.

Bibliography
Stroshine, Meghan S., and Amanda L. Robinson. “The decision to end abusive relationships: The role of offender characteristics.” Criminal Justice and Behavior 30, no. 1 (2003): 97-117.

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