Abstract
The fragmented state of criminological theory is an ongoing concern for many criminologists. Within the context of British criminology, one source of this fragmentation has been attributed to the field’s overreliance on risk-factor approaches to theory development which emphasize the predictive power of various factors statistically associated with crime without explaining how or why crime occurs. In the absence of an underlying theoretical framework to make sense of the interrelationship among these factors, criminology is seen as being left with little more than a body of correlates of crime that are of limited value in explaining and ultimately controlling it.
In the early 2000s, P.O. Wikstöm began developing analytical criminology to respond to this issue. This approach emphasizes answering the “how” and “why” questions about crime by drawing from the mechanical philosophy of science of Mario Bunge. Central to this approach is the view that explaining crime requires integrating individual and environmental explanations of crime to explain why criminal acts occur situationally.
Hardie’s book significantly builds upon this analytical approach by articulating the methodological implications of the situational study of crime. Hardie’s 15 years of experience working with Wikstöm at the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University exposed her to the numerous challenges associated with examining situational explanations of crime as part of the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+).
Studying Situational Action is a short book organized into four chapters, all of which are well written and devoid of needless exposition. The book can be purchased in its entirety or in individual chapters. Purchasing the entire book is recommended as Hardie maintains a cohesive argument throughout the monograph.
The first chapter frames Hardie’s thesis that individual and environmental criminological perspectives must be integrated if crime as an act or event is to be understood and fragmentation in criminology is to be reduced. For such an integration to occur, Hardie contends criminology must shift to an interactive worldview that focuses on person–situation interactions over an additive worldview that emphasizes the criminality of persons or places in isolation from one another. Should this shift occur, criminology would move beyond predictive accounts of criminality or crime and begin to elucidate the mechanisms that produce criminal events, which would allow criminologists to better explain and control crime.
Chapter 2 extends Hardie’s interactional approach by discussing the need for a theory of action if it is to be successful. The chapter provides a useful historical assessment of interactional psychology’s efforts to explain action, which Hardie criticizes for failing to develop a “theoretical model of person–environment interaction” capable of explaining situational behavior. Without a model of action, interactional psychology relied on probabilistic prediction and could not identify the mechanisms through which individuals and settings interacted to produce action. Consequently, interactional psychologists employed research methods designed for additive theoretical approaches that were incompatible with their interactional claims.
This insight by Hardie is one of the significant contributions of the book. As additive approaches entail a process of data aggregation using either individuals or places as units of analysis, they are not well suited for interactional approaches that treat situations—which include individuals, settings, and actions that are collocated in space and time—as units of observation. Hardie notes that a negative consequence of using additive methods to examine interactional phenomena is that they produce ecological fallacies because the aggregated properties of individuals or settings cannot be generalized to situations.
The third chapter examines specific statistical issues that arise when explaining crime situationally, particularly concerning the statistical distribution of infrequent events and the limitations of investigating interaction effects when examining data that conform to interactional or additive worldviews. This chapter is beneficial to those interested in analyzing limited-dependent variables, addressing violations of statistical assumptions of independence, and meaningfully conducting and interpreting statistical analysis.
Lastly, Chapter 4 describes the process of data collection for interactional data where situations serve as the units of analysis. This chapter emphasizes Hardie’s analytical approach’s theory-driven nature that requires interactional theories to be examined using interactional methods. In particular, it describes how situational action theory (Hardie’s preferred interactional theory of crime) has been tested using space–time budgets that require study participants to identify personal states and features of their immediate settings when they engage in criminal or noncriminal acts. Respondents are asked to fill out space–time budgets each hour during a specific period of time. The resulting data set contains situational-level data that allow for interactional hypotheses to be tested in a manner that avoids ecological fallacies.
Despite the significant contributions of the book, it contains at least two issues that require resolution. First, the book neglects long-standing issues related to theory integration and elaboration that have been debated in U.S. criminology since the 1970s. For example, Hardie claims that worldviews cannot compete with one another because they are pre-theoretical and their assumptions cannot be evaluated using crucial tests. While Hardie focuses on interactional and additive worldviews when making this assertion, this argument could be strengthened by referring to the work of U.S. criminologists since the 1970s debating how various assumptions affect theory development.
Second, the term “analytical” is used throughout the book, typically in reference to interactional approaches, but is not clearly defined as a metatheoretical framework. This problem is partially attributable to Hardie’s reliance on the work of Wikstöm, who has yet to specify what analytical criminology entails or how it relates to other analytical approaches, such as the analytical sociology of Hedström. Nonetheless, this problem does require resolution as the perspective continues to develop.
Overall, these criticisms are minor compared to the overall contribution of the book. The theoretical and methodological issues it examines are appropriate for graduate students in criminology or other social sciences and researchers interested in explaining situational action in general or criminal behavior in particular.
