The goal of my project is to examine whether presenting risk assessment information as a fixed or variable probability effects pretrial decision-making. Under the supervision of my mentor, Dr. Evan Lowder, I created eight vignettes to simulate the information a typical pretrial actor would receive during a pretrial hearing. These vignettes varied by risk assessment score and whether the offense was violent. I created one questionnaire for all participants to answer. I uploaded my vignettes and questionnaire to Qualtrics. Next, I recruited judges, pretrial officers, defense attorneys, and prosecutors through locating publicly available contact information for their offices or through professional associations.
An average day this half of the semester involves me
continuing to recruit more participants in order to increase my sample size and
to obtain a more geographically representative sample. I am also in the process
of perfecting an R script to clean and graph the data and creating a Stata
script to analyze the data. Finally, I am refining my manuscript to hopefully
send to publication.
I fell in love in research when I began working with
Dr. Lowder on my own independent research project and with other projects
within the Early Justice Strategies Lab. I decided a year ago that I wanted to
do research permanently which led me to applying to various criminology
doctoral programs last semester. I used an enhanced version of this project’s
proposal as my writing sample to these various schools to illustrate my desire
to conduct research. I believe that this project was one of many factors that
led me to my admission to numerous funded criminology doctoral programs. Through
conducting this research project this semester, I will have a stronger skillset
and overall experience when I begin my doctoral journey next semester.
