Essay questions based on readings

Essay Questions Based on Readings
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How Career Ladder Jobs Increase Employment Prospects
The work is an excellent contribution to the present literature on crime and employment of adolescents. It links the research and theory to the public policies in an even manner and introduces the idea of career-ladder jobs as a lead in reducing delinquency and crime. The book opens up the reader’s mind to new perspectives on employment of adolescents and public policy. The study employs “self-report experiences of labor market participation collected from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97)” (Wang, 2013). The NLSY97 posted the findings of their research on their websites in seven waves. The research had very detailed data on the matter and served the author of the book very well in building his main hypotheses. All of the youths that were used as the research subjects in this study grew up during a time when there was a rapid online accumulation of information (Wang, 2013). This accumulation was made possible by the advancements in information technology that took place during this period. Therefore, the report is a great resource to this and similar studies that deal with the policy implications of the present times.
The author’s main idea, as mentioned in the previous paragraph is using the concept of career ladder jobs as a way of determining the trends of crime and delinquency among the youths and trying to come up with a way of solving them (Wang, 2013).

Going higher on the ladder of status is a great inspiration for many participants of the American job market. Some argue that a career is neither an occupation nor a job but a path that a person decides to take in his professional life. However, there is a general acceptance that certain jobs in the market are “more career-oriented than others.” The traditional idea of a career ladder usually brings out a picture of stepwise climbing in the vertical direction of a career path. This idea is relatively old in the job market and has its roots in sociological views. For example, the American culture is seen to encourage individuals to go after the maximum amount of wealth they can imagine of in the quickest way they can. In this culture, there are institutional methods that the society approves for one to get the much wealth they are expected to get as members of the American society.
The author uses the information gathered and the observations made on career ladder jobs to conceptualize the main idea of the chapter; studying career ladder jobs to help in reducing delinquency and crime among the youth. The author established the conceptual definition of the term career ladder jobs before he could analyze its possible impacts on delinquent demeanors. He defines the jobs as those with a significant potential for future growth. Non-ladder jobs might yield more financial returns in the short run than ladder jobs. However, the future potential of ladder jobs is much greater than that of non-ladder jobs (Wang, 2013). To operationalize his hypothesis, the author researches on the various distinctive characteristics if a career ladder job like its sustainability and significant long-term financial rewards. He also uses data from the NLSY97 to try and see the relation between delinquency and career ladder jobs versus the non-ladder jobs so that he can back his hypothesis.
In any social science research, the development of a reliable measure of the constructs of the study is a critical step. The author of the book did not create his tool but used the already existing “inter-rater reliability technique” to give an appropriate measure to his central concept of the chapter (Wang, 2013). The inter-rater reliability is the degree to which two or more raters vary in terms of their judgments on the same items. A measure is deemed reliable if there is a reasonable level of consensus among many raters. In other words, the consistency in the rater scores determines the inter-rater reliability; the higher the level of consensus among a bigger number of raters, the more accurate the measure is considered to be. In this chapter, the researchers used the agreement in the opinions of experts with a lot “of knowledge and experience in the field to gauge the reliability of the study results. The National Career Development Association (NCDA) and the National Board for Certified Counsellors (NBCC) were identified as the two bodies with the best knowledge on American jobs (Wang, 2013). NCDA had both student and professional members, as a result, the researchers decided that National Certified Career Counsellor (NCCC), an affiliate of the NBCC was the best body to help with classifying occupations (Wang, 2013). Since 20 coders had accepted to take part in the research, the researcher used a random sampling technique to select 40 NCCCs to help with the classification of jobs (Wang, 2013). He then narrowed down the list to 18 whom he eventually recruited to help out with the research. After extensive research, the study concluded that career ladder jobs indeed help discourage youths from engaging in crime.
Fundamentals of Research in Criminology and Criminal Justice
The book makes complicated concepts simpler with quality examples to give a comprehensive yet simple to understand introduction to the design of studies in the fields of criminal justice and criminology. The author focuses mainly on the major arms of the criminal justice framework. Chapters 4 and 5 of the book talk to the readers about the qualitative research methods as well as surveys and experimental methods of determining the reliability and validity of results. He uses tables and figures to aid the reader in further understanding the concepts that he discusses in the two chapters mentioned above. According to the chapters, reliability means that the method adopted by a researcher produces consistent results through varying samples (Bachman & Schutt, 2016). The author says that if a measure is reliable, then errors like chance variation have minimal effect on it. The opposite is true for non-reliable measures. The author then concludes that the validity of a measurement is necessary for any social research. He says that collecting data for a study without efforts to conceptualize how the study will be operationalized is a waste of effort (Bachman & Schutt, 2016). He advises anyone intending to attain valid and reliable measures from his study to carefully plan ahead of the exercise.
In conclusion, Wang’s book is an example of a well done social research. He tries to find a link between career ladder jobs and delinquency and establish how that link can be used to reduce crime among the youth. Bachman and Schutt’s book gives tips and advice on how to conduct a proper social research with valid and reliable measures. Most of the techniques that the author talks about in the two chapters are broadly employed by Wang in his study; this might be the reason why he gets reliable measures in his study and manages to prove his hypothesis with ease.
References
Bachman, R. D., Schutt, R. K., & Plass, P. S. (2016). Fundamentals of Research in Criminology and Criminal Justice: With Selected Readings. Sage Publications.
Wang, S. Y. K. (2013). How Career-ladder Jobs Increase Employment Prospects: Redeeming Lives from the Consequences of Youth Delinquency. Edwin Mellen Press.