Is Criminology Moving Toward a Paradigm Shift?: Evidence from a Survey of the American Society of Criminology

Ideology forms and colors our attitudes and values in ways that lead to a tendency to accept or reject data according to how well or how poorly they cohere with that ideology. Previous research has suggested that the ideological divide in criminology is between criminologists who focus on strictly environmentalist theories that give short shrift to individual differences, and those who focus on individual differences and are favorably disposed to the biological sciences (Wright & Miller, 1998; Walsh & Ellis, 2004). The former tend to be radicals and liberals and the latter tend to be conservatives and moderates, although there is no one-to-one correspondence (Wright & Miller, 1998). The theoretical disarray in criminology occasioned by this tendency (among other things) has been noted by a number of scholars (Barak, 1998; Dantzker, 1998; Walsh, 2002).

The present study repeats and extends these earlier studies with the goals of evaluating the relationship between ideology and favored theory in comparison with the earlier studies to ascertain if the grip of ideology is loosening, and of assessing the possibility of interdisciplinary integration.