Social Science Space

Some criminal investigations resonate over the years. Even if you’ve only had peripheral involvement with them, as in my case, […]

Recent publications have encouraged me not to keep quiet about this any longer. Now is the time to explain why I find the term ‘profiling’ so problematic yet get stuck with using it.

The referendum on Scottish independence, scheduled for 2014, may be regarded as an amusing abstraction for those outside Scotland but within it raises many questions about Scottish identity and what is special about Scottish society.

With the exponential expansion even over the last few months of Web 2.0 it is important for social scientists to get a grip on the wide-reaching implications of these developments.

When some journalist awards a case a sobriquet like The Railway Rapist, or the Moors Murderers that the media has got its teeth into the case and will shake as much life out of it as possible.

Although the value of Randomised Controlled Trials in very specific contexts cannot be denied, any imperialist claims for its universal applicability and its use as a bench mark against which all other studies must to be measured needs to be challenged.

You can hardly open a newspaper or listen to a factual broadcast without some reference to neuroscience or evolutionary explanations of things that people do, feel or think.

Apparently Luka Rocco Magnotta made videos of himself killing cats and eating parts of his murdered victim, making the videos […]

The challenge of writing popular psychology came home to me recently when I accepted the invitation to write Forensic Psychology for Dummies

Social Science research is changing our understanding of the police and policing. This is raising fundamental questions about how police officers are recruited, trained and organised

The ability of people to keep their most desperate, innermost thoughts hidden from those around them is surely something that juries ought to be reminded of in cases where a death could be suicide or murder…

The ponderousness, and consequent unnecessary expense, of many legal processes was brought home to me yet again with my recent […]