Assessing Asymmetry: The Life Course of a Research Project
This article describes the evolution of a project examining the impact of encounters on public
confidence in the police. It reviews the background of the research, the central puzzle that drove the project,
and the events that led to its 10 discovery. I was surprised by my initial inability to confirm the expected
relationship between encounters and confidence. Rather than encouraging confidence, encounters that
people themselves rated positively did not seem to increase satisfaction with police, and for many actually
made things worse. Here I discuss how I confronted this puzzle, what I concluded, and what other 15
researchers have since done with the findings. I conclude with some notes on the research agenda implied
by all of this research, and how the entire process accords with the ways in which scientific research
proceeds.
This article describes the evolution of a project examining the impact of encounters on public
confidence in the police. It reviews the background of the research, the central puzzle that drove the project,
and the events that led to its 10 discovery. I was surprised by my initial inability to confirm the expected
relationship between encounters and confidence. Rather than encouraging confidence, encounters that
people themselves rated positively did not seem to increase satisfaction with police, and for many actually
made things worse. Here I discuss how I confronted this puzzle, what I concluded, and what other 15
researchers have since done with the findings. I conclude with some notes on the research agenda implied
by all of this research, and how the entire process accords with the ways in which scientific research
proceeds.
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Police-Public Encounters Abstracts