What Is Criminology? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths

Criminology is the scientific study of crime: why it occurs, how it is measured and distributed across people and places, how societies and legal systems respond to it, and what actually reduces it. It is an empirical, interdisciplinary field — not a branch of law, and not the same thing as “criminal justice,” which is the narrower, more applied study of the institutions (police, courts, corrections) that process crime once it happens. Criminologists draw on sociology, psychology, economics, biology, geography and statistics to build and test theories about the causes of criminal behavior, then use those theories to evaluate policies and interventions.

The discipline’s core questions are consistent across a century of research: What causes some people, in some places, at some times, to commit crime while others in similar circumstances do not? How is crime distributed — by neighborhood, by age, by social class — and why? How reliable is any given measure of “how much crime there is,” given that most crime is never reported? And does a specific policy, program or sentence actually reduce offending, or does it just look like it does in a study with weak design? A strong criminologist answers these with data and a testable model, not intuition about who “seems like” a criminal.

Criminology is closely related to, but distinct from, its neighboring fields. Where sociology studies social structure broadly, criminology narrows that lens to lawbreaking and social control specifically. Where psychology studies individual cognition and behavior generally, criminology focuses on the subset of behavior that violates law and on group- and place-level patterns that individual psychology alone cannot explain. And criminology relies heavily on statistics and quantitative methods to separate real effects (a policy that actually changed offending) from noise (a crime rate that would have fallen anyway).

Major sub-disciplines within criminology

• Criminological theory — the explanatory frameworks for why crime occurs: strain theory, social learning theory, social control/self-control theory, routine activity theory, labeling theory, and life-course/developmental criminology, which tracks how offending patterns change across a person’s lifespan.
• Victimology — the study of crime victims: patterns of victimization risk, the psychological and economic impact of crime on victims, and how the justice system treats (or fails to treat) victims.
• Penology and corrections — the study of punishment, sentencing and incarceration: what different sanctions (prison, probation, restorative justice) actually do to reoffending rates, and the effects of incarceration on individuals and communities.
• Policing studies — research on police organization, tactics (e.g., hot-spot policing, problem-oriented policing) and their effects on crime and community trust, plus use-of-force and procedural-justice research.
• Environmental and spatial criminology — how crime clusters in specific places and situations, drawing on crime-mapping and geographic analysis rather than only on offenders’ individual traits.
• Criminal justice policy and law and society — how legislatures, courts and agencies design and implement crime policy, and how legal institutions actually function in practice versus on paper.
• Biosocial and developmental criminology — how biological, neurological and early-childhood developmental factors interact with social environment to shape offending risk over the life course.
• Cybercrime and white-collar crime — offending that doesn’t fit the traditional street-crime model: online fraud, hacking, corporate and financial crime, and the distinct enforcement challenges each poses.

Funding the field: who pays for criminology research

Criminology in the United States is funded through a mix of federal justice-focused agencies, general science funders, and a small number of major private foundations. The largest and most criminology-specific federal funder is the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the research, development and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs. NIJ funds research and program evaluation across policing, corrections, courts, forensic science, victimization and violence prevention, and it is the primary source of federal grant dollars aimed specifically at criminal-justice practice and policy. The related Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), also within the Department of Justice, funds research specifically on juvenile offending and the juvenile justice system.

Outside the Department of Justice, the National Science Foundation funds basic (rather than applied/practice) criminological research primarily through its Law & Social Sciences (LSS) program, housed in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences within the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). LSS funds theory-driven research on crime, violence, policing, courts, and punishment and corrections, alongside doctoral dissertation improvement grants and standard collaborative research awards. NSF’s Sociology program, in the same division, also funds crime-adjacent research that sits closer to social-structural questions than to justice-system practice.

The federal government’s other major role is data infrastructure rather than direct research funding: the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), also part of the Office of Justice Programs, produces and funds the collection of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and other criminal-justice statistical series that most criminology research ultimately draws on. On the private side, the most notable and verifiable funder in this space is Arnold Ventures, whose Criminal Justice program funds randomized evaluations and evidence-based policy research on policing, pretrial detention, sentencing and corrections — see CASRAI’s guide to Arnold Ventures’ evidence-based policy grants for a closer look at how that program operates. The MacArthur Foundation has also been a significant funder of criminal-justice-reform research and practice (notably through its Safety and Justice Challenge), though researchers should always confirm a foundation’s current program priorities directly, since philanthropic funding priorities shift more often than federal program structures.

Research methods and data sources

Criminology is a heavily quantitative field, but it draws on both quantitative and qualitative traditions:

• Official crime statistics — the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and its successor, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which record crimes known to police.
• Victimization surveys — chiefly the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which captures crime that goes unreported to police and is essential for understanding the “dark figure” of unreported crime.
• Self-report studies — surveys in which respondents report their own offending, used to study behaviors (like drug use or minor delinquency) that official statistics undercount.
• Quasi-experimental and experimental designs — including randomized controlled trials of policing tactics or interventions, and quasi-experimental designs (difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, matched comparison groups) used when random assignment isn’t feasible, which is common in field criminology.
• Geographic and spatial analysis — GIS-based crime mapping and hot-spot analysis to study where and why crime concentrates.
• Systematic review and meta-analysis — increasingly central to “what works” policy questions in criminal justice, often coordinated through the Campbell Collaboration’s Crime and Justice group, which applies the same evidence-synthesis rigor as medical systematic reviews.
• Qualitative methods — interviews, ethnography and case studies, particularly for understanding offender decision-making, desistance from crime, and lived experience of victimization or incarceration that numbers alone can’t capture.
• Statistical software — criminologists typically analyze data in R, Stata, SPSS or similar packages, with multilevel/hierarchical modeling common given that crime data is naturally nested (individuals within neighborhoods within cities).

Career and training paths

Criminology is typically taught as its own department or jointly with sociology, and sometimes as “criminology and criminal justice” or “criminal justice” depending on the institution’s emphasis on theory versus applied practice. A bachelor’s degree is the entry point for many criminal-justice-system and analyst roles; a master’s degree (MS/MA in criminology or criminal justice) is common for research-analyst, policy and program-evaluation positions in government and nonprofits. A PhD — typically a research-focused program of four to six years including original dissertation research — is the standard credential for academic, university-based research careers and for senior research-scientist roles at federal agencies like NIJ or BJS or at research organizations that conduct criminal-justice evaluation work.

Unlike clinical psychology, criminology does not have a licensure requirement to practice as a researcher — there is no equivalent of a clinical license, since the work is research and policy analysis rather than direct clinical practice. The field’s central professional societies are the American Society of Criminology (ASC), the largest and oldest scholarly society in the field, and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS), which leans somewhat more toward the applied criminal-justice-practice side; both hold annual conferences that function as the discipline’s main venues for presenting new research. Career paths span academia, federal and state research agencies (NIJ, BJS, state statistical analysis centers), nonprofit and think-tank policy research, program evaluation consulting, and research roles embedded within police departments or court systems doing internal data analysis.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between criminology and criminal justice?

Criminology is the broader, theory-driven study of crime and its causes; criminal justice is the more applied study of the institutions — police, courts, corrections — that respond to crime. In practice the two overlap heavily and many departments teach them together, but a criminology course asks “why does crime happen,” while a criminal justice course is more likely to ask “how does the system that processes it actually work.”

Is criminology a science?

Yes, in the sense that matters: it builds falsifiable theories about crime and tests them against data, using the same broad toolkit (surveys, experiments, quasi-experiments, statistical modeling) as sociology, psychology and public health. It sits within the social sciences rather than the natural sciences, but it follows the same empirical standard of revising claims that the evidence doesn’t support.

What jobs can you get with a criminology degree?

Common paths include research analyst roles in government criminal-justice agencies, program evaluation and policy research at nonprofits and think tanks, crime analyst positions within police departments, victim services and advocacy roles, probation and parole work, and — with a PhD — university faculty and senior federal research-scientist positions.

Do you need a PhD to work in criminology?

No. A bachelor’s or master’s degree is sufficient for most applied research-analyst, crime-analyst and policy positions in government and nonprofit settings. A PhD is generally required specifically for university faculty positions and for the most senior, independent research-scientist roles at federal agencies.

Related CASRAI guides

This guide is part of CASRAI’s branches of science series. For neighboring disciplines and the research-methods and funding concepts referenced above, see What Is Sociology?, What Is Psychology?, What Is Political Science?, What Is Statistics?, What Is Demography?, and CASRAI’s guide to Arnold Ventures’ evidence-based policy grants.