Measuring crime: Methodological considerations on recording and interpreting crime statistics in local-national, European and international levels

The article is based on the research project "Creating of a Node for Processing and Management of Secondary Socio-Economic Data and Indicators" of the National Centre for Social Research. The specific objective of this study is to establish a strategic comparative research plan for collecting and analyzing forensic data at a secondary level, as well as to develop the appropriate infrastructure for conducting comparative studies. The difficulty of "homogenizing" the data is noted, since it emerged as a practical problem during the study, as well as the operational requirements that need to be met in order to operate an infrastructure system that aims to incorporate sets of sociological data.

Subsequently, the parameters that identify the theoretical and methodological interests of the study are mentioned. Those are, in short, the following: a) The study material consists of numbers or summaries of numerical data describing the crime numerically. They do, however, enfold qualitative definitions of the phenomena as well in another level, b) Due to the fact that the data come from institutions of the Official Criminal Justice Award System (such as courts, prisons and police departments), they inevitably provide information on the social response to crime. This information concerns not only the functioning of the Criminal Justice Award System, but also its philosophical background that identifies its practices; c) During the processing of secondary data, concerns arise regarding the recording, classification and conversion of primary information into numbers even at the stage of primary processing, that is, at the source (Nations Statistical Service).

The article concludes that, in order to address all these theoretical and methodological issues, studies such as the present are necessary, attempting the deconstruction and reconstruction of quantitative forensic data through a specific prospect over time.