ABSTRACT
Although many IP studies do not use the facet approach, using the approach has facilitated developments in understanding that might not have come so readily otherwise (see Canter, 1983, 1985). The particular IP use of the approach to work with challenging, non-research generated (and often qualitative) data (see Canter and Youngs, 2009) has allowed insights and answers to debates that more traditional approaches have not, in particular facilitating the modelling of human behaviour as systemic structures and producing conceptual frameworks that can tolerate unreliable data. The integrated facet modelling approach, first proposed by Professor Canter in the early 1990s, to map multivariate domains, such as offence actions to offender characteristics, remains the most conceptually sophisticated approach to establishing these inferential relationships (see Canter and Youngs, 2009; Youngs, 2008). The use of MSA in the linking or ‘comparative case analysis’ task, is a further illustration of the potential of this innovative use of the facet approach in the investigative domain.
