Welcome to Applied Psychology, Criminology & Law.
There are very few courses in College that can offer a more compelling and often divisive subject, with social and political issues that can lead to lively and engaging lessons. We look forward to developing and supporting all your learning needs over the coming academic year.
As you start your journey with this course, we would like you to complete a research task. This will be done by completing the series of activities listed below, which will incorporate all three of the subject areas you will be studying over the academic year.
Research a type of crime and its effects
Produce a piece of research from one of the following types of crime. You can choose an area from one of the following:
Firstly, you will need to give a definition for crime and deviance: write down an explanation for each.
Once you have chosen one of the four types of crime mentioned above, you will need to identify the different types of crime within that crime area. Then you will investigate the types of criminal behaviour that are associated with your chosen type of crime. You can research these behaviours on the internet or in any written publications. To strengthen your research in your chosen crime, you will need to link the sociological influences behind an individual’s reasoning for committing their crimes.
You will then describe who the types of victims tend to be and the effects crime has on them. For example, you can investigate domestic abuse, race or religious hate crime. It will be key for you to understand and identify the effects these crimes have on the victims.
Finally, for your chosen crime, you will need to describe the possible punishable consequences that a Court of Law would administer and the possible sentence the accused would face. You will need to link this with a relevant case study to support this.
In order to gain an understanding of the effects of criminal behaviour and the justice system, it would be valuable for you to read through this article, to get an understanding of how case studies are structured and how these studies develop ideas and thoughts. Write a quick paragraph of no more than 100 words on the following:
Do you think he deserved the punishment and why? Support this with evidence from the article.
The first 144 pages of the Introduction to Criminology book are free to read on Google and cover large areas of the WJEC specification.
The below video is 36 mins in length and will help you to understand and link the three subject areas we will be further looking into later in the year. You will need to make some notes as this will be normal practice within some of the future lessons planned. The notes you take will be needed for a class discussion in the first meeting we have. The video will give you some background on the types of behaviours associated with criminal activity. You can play devil’s advocate by making your own judgements as to whether you think the sentence was either too harsh or lenient. Enjoy! This will be an interesting discussion point for our first meeting as a whole class!
