ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to ground the authors' advice about how to do good-quality criminological research in a discussion of theories of knowledge. It talks about three basic theories of knowledge within which criminologists carry out their work: positivism, interpretivism and critical criminological research. The chapter shows that criminological research may be carried out from within various key philosophical traditions, each of which produces different types of knowledge about our world. Criminology has been dominated by the positivist theory of knowledge but the authors have tried to show through their discussion of interpretivism and critical criminological research that this theory of knowledge has some significant limitations. This is not to say that positivism is bad and the other research traditions are good but rather to highlight the need to study the problem of crime in society from a variety of angles in order to gain a more complete picture of what is going on.
