Reply to the following posts:

Discussion Reply 1: Catherine - (150 words)

Reading your post, I am unsure if I answered what was supposed to be an initial post in this discussion. I feel it was open-ended to an extent. You state a lot of information about nomothetic that helps give a generalize explanation to what it is which is a generalized explanation of a causal relationship.

You may not know that you did that but that is how I saw it when I read your post. It is like a two for one deal. Your post is a very good example of what nomothetic means and the three criteria of nomothetic causality. Great post!

Discussion Reply 2: Danielle- (150 words)

I found it interesting that your research shows that unemployment was a weak correlation to crime rate. I wonder why people have that assumption that unemployment is strongly connected to crime rate. However, the more I think about it, I could see why it wouldn't. Unemployed individuals usually qualify for government or state services that allow them to survive. For example, my 2 youngest kids nanny is on full blown section 8, yet reports the income she receives from me.

It has no impact on her services package. I guess what I'm getting at is that when a need is fulfilled then there's no need to commit the crime. However, if you grew up the way I did, my family totally broke and being about $200 above the annual poverty level, we didn't qualify for any subsidies. I remember my father actually stole food from his job in order to feed us so we didn't starve. So yes, now that I think about this I can see the difference.

Discussion Reply 3: Lauren - (100 words)

There were three important criteria of nomothetic causality discussed in the last couple of chapters. According to the text, nomothetic is defined as "impacts a class of conditions or events" (Babbiie, E., 2013) these three include, correlation, time order, and nonspurious. These all were discussed in chapter three and continue to make an appearance throughout the chapters. Causality is very important within criminological theories because they help to define the crime and the criminal.

Correlation helps to establish a sense of repetition because it keeps track of how often a variable occurs. Correlation is found between two variables

The second criteria is time order. Time order is important when measuring the occurrence of criminal activity. Time order helps keep information organized and measures the time between events.

Nonspurious is the third main criteria. This term means that the variables cannot always be explained. There is an occasional their variable that goes against nomothetic causality.

These three terms described are the three main criteria of nomothetic causality. They define the casual relationship between variables.

Discussion Reply 4 - Evan (150 words)

Nomothetic is it essentially choosing a few of the factors that would affect a result. If we look at a hypothesis for example the research paper, my hypothesis if cyber security defenses than should cyber attacks decrease?

If this is the case the idiographic approach would be to look at everyone possible factor that would impact this hypothesis. But a nomothetic approach focuses on a few factors, we could say technology and education. With this we are looking at how these two factors either agree or disagree with the statement. Before that happens let's look at the three rules that are needed to create this nomothetic causality.

The first is variables must be correlated, this means that they must have something in common or delve in the same field. If we were to add food as one of our factors it would not have any correlation to the hypothesis. The second rule is cause happens before impact.

In the example we have here, this would mean the security would have to increase before the result of the cyber attacks would increase or decrease. The third rule is the variables are nonspurious, this means that a third variable cannot explain what the hypothesis says. So in our example we cannot have a third variable that says would mitigate or remove the need for increased security.