My job is to introduce a little tension into an otherwise harmonious system.
— Charles Tittle in “The Arrogance of Public Sociology”
about the reluctant criminologists
Welcome to our site! We are Jon Brauer and Jake Day, aka the “reluctant criminologists.”
We created this site to publicly share course materials and musings about scientific theory and methods. In particular, we provide course materials containing crime-relevant examples to help interested scholars in our field learn to use R and to improve the reproducibility of their workflows. Additionally, we will post occasional blog entries about topics in our areas of interest, including philosophy of science, criminology theory, and statistical techniques (e.g., ordinal modeling; Bayesian estimation; data visualization). We are also open to the idea of collaborating with or posting others’ course materials and topical blog posts, so feel free to contact us with your ideas.
With respect to philosophy of science and criminology theory, we were both heavily influenced by the late Dr. Charles R. Tittle. The name of our site is meant to be a cheeky reference to one of our favorite pieces written by Charles: “Reflections of a Reluctant but Committed Criminologist” in Gilbert Geis and Mary Dodge’s Lessons of Criminology (pp.23-45). You can read more about how he directly inspired our site’s name (“Reluctant Criminologists”) in our welcome blog. However, we wish to make it clear that although we were influenced and inspired by him, Charles in no way endorsed the project, and he likely would have thought it was a waste of time better spent contributing (in more traditional ways) to scientific theory development and testing. We think it’s safe to say that we are both more “reluctant” and less “committed” criminologists than Charles was.
In sharing course content and posts containing R code, we are committing to the practice of coding in public. Likewise, we expect to learn more than we teach through readers’ constructive feedback on our innumerable coding inefficiencies and inevitable errors. So, please do reach out with suggestions or corrections.
Finally, if we contribute anything of value on this site, undoubtedly someone else - one or more of our many countless scientific heroes who tirelessly publish through traditional scientific outlets and/or share scientific information and resources via their own blogs, bookdowns, and videos - deserve the lion’s share of credit for it. To borrow again from Charles Tittle (and specifically his preface to Control Balance), none of these people contributed to the errors or other shortcomings found in any materials that we post on this site.