THE DISASTER VICTIM COMMUNITY: PART OF THE SOLUTION, NOT THE PROBLEM

One of the greatest disaster relief resources available to emergency management officials is the disaster victim community. Contrary to a popular image of social and psychological breakdown in the aftermath of a sudden catastrophic event, impacted communities do respond rationally and adaptively. Recommendations are advanced for utilizing community groups in pre-disaster planning and in relief operations used during the emergency period.     

Middlemen of the Law: An Ethnographic Inquiry into the English Legal Profession

The accomplishments of empirical research are often presented in a context that fails to show the process by which the results came about. This article examines the problems, hitches, and struggles encountered in a research project carried out on the English bar. And emphasis is given to the difficulty of tackling hitherto unexplored occupations that have had a long history of resisting research.     

On the Robustness and Validity of Groups

In response to Nagin's comment on our paper, Methodological Sensitivities to Latent Class Analysis of Long-Term Criminal Trajectories, we reconsider the robustness and validity of group-based approaches to criminal trajectories and introduce additional issues for future research. We emphasize the limitations of typological approaches and the dangers of reifying the idea of distinct offender groupings for research and policy. We also clarify misunderstandings about the use of hierarchical linear models for studying trajectories of crime. Our basic conclusion is that methods in criminology need to be more tightly linked with theory.