Offender Profiling Research

305 Words2 Pages
Question 1: What question does this research attempt to answer?
The investigative tool of offender profiling has been the subject of vigorous debate among investigative officials and academics for decades. Primarily, criticisms of the practice concern the lack of empirical evidence indicating the homology of crime scene actions and offender characteristics. However, the authors of this study, Goodwill, Lehmann, Beauregard and Andrei (2014), argue that this is attributable to a failure to analyse offender actions in the context of a dynamic decision making process. Therefore, this study attempts to answer the question of whether investigators can accurately infer characteristics of offenders based on crime scene actions, by identifying temporal