Planning: Where do research ideas come from? How do we ‘fine tune’ them?

In Chapter 2 we introduced you to the different theories of knowledge within which criminological research has been carried out. We demonstrated that the ways in which researchers’ theories about how the social world should be defined and about what is the best way to gather knowledge on the social world will influence the questions that we seek to answer through our research. In this chapter we are concerned with where our ideas (or concepts) come from and the relationship of these ideas to lower levels of theory – what we might call specific theories – about crime.