SOCIOL 4462- Feb 16th Lab REVIEWING RESEARCH EXERCISE

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Apr 3, 2024

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REVIEWING RESEARCH EXERCISE Today’s exercise has two main objectives:  Practice analyzing the results of prior research.  Examine an example of a causal analysis in Sociology, specifically an example of a social science experiment. Follow the instructions below for each step below. The steps require you to log into Carmen and access the lab module for today. Step 1 Open the Pager et al. article (Criminalizing Poverty: The Consequences of Court Fees in a Randomized Experiment) linked in the lab module and spend about 10-15 minutes reading it over, following the practices we discussed in class this week. Read the abstract. Then read over the data and methods section to get a sense of the research approach. Third, examine the tables and figures that present the main findings. Finally, read the conclusion, focusing in particular on the study summary. Step 2 Answer the following questions about the research approach in the article:  What is the research question? Do court-related fines and fees contribute to the criminalization of poverty?  Where is the field site? Court in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma  What are the control and treatment groups? What do the authors’ mean by “treatment”? The control group consists of misdemeanor defendants who did not receive any debt relief, while the treatment group consists of misdemeanor defendants who received debt relief. The author refers to the "treatment" as the intervention of relieving the participants in the treatment group from their court-related fines and fees.  What is the cause being tested? What is/are the effect or effects that are being?

Cause: Provision of debt relief to misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma County, specifically court- related fines, and fees. Effects: Financial outcome for defendants, future behaviors of defendants (new criminal charges, convictions, or jail bookings)  In your own words, why is randomization important to establish causality? Can you give a specific example of how the conclusions in this study could be wrong if randomization weren’t used? Randomization helps ensure that any differences observed between the treatment and control groups are due to the treatment itself and not to other factors. It will minimize bias and increase the generalization of the findings. If you don’t use this method, it could decrease the validity of your results and influence selective bias. If participants were not randomly assigned to the treatment and control groups, there could be systematic differences between the groups. For example, if individuals with certain characteristics were more likely to be assigned to the treatment group, any observed differences in outcomes could be due to these characteristics rather than the treatment itself. Step 3 Examine Table 3 on page 542. In your own words, what are the core findings in this table? You may need to refer to the article text to interpret the findings. Do you have any questions about how to interpret those results? From the table, I can see that giving people help with their court fees didn't change how often they got into new trouble with the law, except for going to jail. The treatment group was more likely to end up in jail but helping them with their fees seemed to reduce this. In the control group, the effect of getting help with fees on going to jail was positive, but it wasn't clear if it was because of the help or not. Also, it seemed like helping people with fees had a bigger impact on reducing new court actions for those without jobs. (Yes I had trouble reading this graph. I asked you to help me and you helped me, thank you.) Next look at Tables 4 and 5. What are those meant to test and why do the authors think these are important tests to evaluate? In your own words, what do those tables find?

Step 4 What are limitations to this study? Is there anything about the study approach that makes you less confident of the findings? Are there issues that you think challenge the causal claims or are you convinced that the researchers have done a good job to establish causality? Finally, what about generalizability? Do you think that the study applies beyond the field site? Step 5 [if you still have time left in lab] Look over the Harris et al. article ( Drawing Blood from Stones: Legal Debt and Social Inequality in the Contemporary United States) linked in the lab module. (We will also be reading this article for lecture in a couple weeks.) This was the first article in Sociology about legal debt and Alexes Harris also wrote a book that expanded on this article in 2016. Both of these pieces are cited heavily in the Pager et al. article. Examine Table 1, Figure 1 and Figure 2 for the key descriptive quantitative findings. The findings section on “consequences” reports the results of interviews and direct quotes from those interviews are reported in set out indented paragraphs. Then look at the conceptual model in Figure 3. Are any of the pathways in that figure tested by the experiment in the Pager et al. study you reviewed in class today? If you’re interested in this topic, there were two issues of the Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences published in 2022 and dedicated to recent studies: State Monetary Sanctions and the Costs of the Criminal Legal System: How the System of Monetary Sanctions Operates January 01, 2022 : Vol. 8 , Issue 1 : 1-243 [click to link to issue] State Monetary Sanctions and the Costs of the Criminal Legal System: The Consequences of Monetary Sanctions January 01, 2022 : Vol. 8 , Issue 2 : 1-172 [click to link to issue]

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