ABSTRACT
Introduction The purpose of this and the following chapter is not to provide you with everything you need for the purpose of doing your fi rst piece of criminological research – a long essay or a dissertation. Rather, it is to give you an overview of some of the important things you will probably need to take into consideration; to provide a short overview of a number of things – such as research methods – that you will undoubtedly need to read about in much greater detail in due course; to provide some tips about how to go about the task in front of you and, perhaps, to save you from one or two of the diffi culties you might otherwise face. So, what follows is not a how to guide. It is not all the nuts and bolts of doing criminological research – that would require another textbook, quite possibly as large as this one. What I want to do here is walk you through some of the main features of research so that you have a general feel for what is involved and know where to go next in search of further information.
