It’s Episode 79 of The Criminology Academy podcast! On today’s episode, we have Professor Volkan Topalli on the podcast. We discuss an overview of active offender research, the St. Louis School approach, challenges associated with active offender research, and how this area of research can expand to more than just primarily qualitative methodologies!
Volkan Topalli is a Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia State University and Co-Editor of Criminology. He received his PhD in Experimental Social Psychology from Tulane University in 1998. His scholarly research addresses violence in urban settings, with a particular focus on the decision-making of street criminals. To pursue these interests he employs a multi-method approach with active, noninstitutionalized hardcore street offenders (robbers, carjackers, drug dealers). He has conducted roughly 400 interviews with such individuals in New Orleans, St. Louis, and Atlanta over the past 20 years. His current research is on the decision-making of offenders in cybercontexts and the future of crime and accelerating technology. He is author of peer-reviewed research in such outlets as Criminology, Justice Quarterly, The British Journal of Criminology, The Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and Criminal Justice & Behavior.
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Episode Transcriptions Available Below for Download: Word (.docx) and PDF (.pdf)
Get in touch with Volkan:
Georgia State University Website // vtopalli AT gsu.edu // Twitter
This is the article authored by Volkan and his colleagues that was discussed in this episode of The Crim Academy:
Topalli, V., Dickinson, T., & Jacques, S. (2020). Learning from criminals: Active offender research for criminology. Annual Review of Criminology, 3, 189-215. [Article Link].