Critical Review of Wallace and Wray

We had to turn in a Critical Analysis of a article on Eldercide, or homicide of older people. We worked on this before (see here). It's a morbid topic, to be sure, but I hated that it pulls me so far from my topic. To that end, I had to write with four other students and review this article. What was very odd about this article was that they depended on a database of homicide states that only pulled data from 20% of the US. Seems like a small sample. 

It hit me in the first answer box when Wallace and Wray wrote, "This text is useful because it gathers a large amount of evidence from different sources, to give a large-scale view of the profile of the victim-offender demographic patterns in homicide of the elderly." I immediately questioned their idea of large amount of data. I wondered if they meant the vast "amounts" of data within the NIBRS rather than large in terms of diverse. Regardless, I find it interesting that our team focused so much on the limitations of the data that the NIBRS provided Krienert and Walsh, while the first thing in the Wallace and Wray article mentioned that that was a positive. 

Personally, and rather selfishly, I jumped straight to questions 7 and 8 to see if they had or had not identified a "value stance." I had trouble identifying a true value stance, and we even mentioned that Krienert and Walsh seemed to let the data speak for themselves, so I was dismayed when this document listed: "The authors do not make their own value stance explicit." Then I read the second answer under seven where they discussed the authors' implicit value stance. Like us, they seemed to have struggled with this aspect of the analysis as well. Krinert and Walsh seemed to have done an admirable job of keeping things hidden in terms of their biases and value judgements about their analysis, eldercide, and the data.  

I was also impressed in the similarities in what they wrote about the authors' certainty when they wrote: "The authors’ certainty about their own figures is high, because it’s based on statistical analyses. They view their own figures as more reliable than those of others that contradict them, and give their reasons why." Although ours was not do verbose, we believed the same about Krienert and Walsh.

Finally, I was very impressed with our team (I think it was Les) pointing out that the data within the period study changed DURING the study period. Wallace and Wray point out that the NIBRS data had many of the flaw with urban vs rural reporting that we found, but I don't see any mention to the data change within the study period, unless I missread it.  

Referecnes

Krienert, J. and Walsh, J. (2010) ‘Eldercide: A gendered examination of elderly homicide in the United States, 2000–2005’, Homicide Studies, 14 (1): 52–71.

Wallace, M. & Wray, A. (2016). Critical reading and writing for postgraduates (3rd edition). Sage Publishing. ISBN: 9781412961813