ABSTRACT
Understanding how offenders make decisions when offending is vital if society is to prevent such crimes from happening in the first place and is an important part of developing effective approaches to rehabilitation. Focusing on residential burglary, this chapter will trace how research has developed over time, leading to an ever-increasing understanding of how burglars think and behave when offending. This chapter discusses how methods for capturing data have gradually increased in sophistication from the early days of interviews and photo elicitation through experimental methods and more recently towards the use of simulated, virtual environments. The implications and benefits of these methodological developments for understanding and preventing crime are explained.
