In this article, the authors conducted an experimental study to examine the effect of three different interventions on reducing the domestic assault. The three interventions were arrest, ordering the offender to leave the house, and providing advice. These three interventions were given randomly to 33 officers (some of them did not continue the study which made the researchers to gather more officers) who attended workshops to be prepared to this study. After the interventions, the cases were followed for six months and the police data and victims’ reports were collected. The results indicated that the arrest had more impact than the other two interventions. The study last for 18 months which was the required time to …show more content…
It is crucial to insure that the three interventions were delivered properly. The author tried to monitor the intervention delivery but due to some difficulties they failed. The big question is raised here is whether the study findings were due to the interventions or due to the delivered officers? The results indicated that the arrest was more significant, but may be because the officers fail to deliver the other two intervention properly; it is obvious that advising and ordering to leave require more skills than …show more content…
It is possible that victims might be biased; some victims may claim that assault happened again just to get rid of offenders or to teach them a lesson. On the other hand, some victims might be threatened or scared to tell the truth. Even though the police data and victims’ reports revealed the same conclusion, that does not mean they match each other. It is unclear whether the authors looked closely to some cases and compared the police data with victims’ reports to insure consistency.
Other Issues with the Study One of the first question one might ask when reading this study is that how ethical it is? We were told that it is the officers’ call to determine whether the case could be included in the study or not. Some officers may decide incorrectly to include some cases that should not be included just to fill some study reports. One of the dangerous scenarios is that when an officer decides a case is a fit one and when he or she takes the report it is happened to be an advice one, which may leave the victim in danger due to a bad call. Another issue is that we were never told why the author decided to begin with 34 officers (one of them refused so they began with 33). Further, they did not explain why they decided to collect 300 cases? More information should be given to help conducted similar