Investigative Psychology: A Narrative Analysis

Investigative Psychology (IP) is a framework for the investigation of psychology into areas of criminal and civil investigation which is referred to throughout criminal investigations. This Assignment will attempt to give a critical analysis and evaluate the narratives of criminality, the radex of criminality and will identify the homicide model of offending behaviour and how IP is applied so such circumstances.

Narratives of criminality consist of examining the themes, plots, characters and identify what the dominant role is. Narratives of criminality are observed in a similar way to how a life story would be observed to distinguish different themes which are used to describe different features of offending behaviour. Criminal narratives

Interviews can be shaped to draw information about the role of the offender during the crime which is considered as important. This is also important to link crimes to one offender by identifying the dominant narrative of how the offender views themselves. However, the most crucial role of the narrative approach is it provides the basis for identifying inferences about the offender which are open to empirical examination. Additionally Polkinghorne (1988) together with McAdams (1988) suggests the identified roles are valuable summaries of more complicated processes. The narrative model is associated with the concept of scripts identified by Abelson (1981). Although narratives of criminality can be beneficial in determining the characteristics of an offender, empirical research is conducted on law-abiding citizens or people who are already imprisoned. Therefore, it is unclear whether the narrative of criminality framework would be valuable against an unknown

It is assumed there is a criminal hierarchy developed by Farrington (1988). The criminal hierarchy identifies patterns of offending behaviour to categorise a type of crime (Klein, 1984) which uses dimensions to describe crime. The focus surrounds the action of a criminal to define who the person is which can potentially merge into each other in a continuous circle. This is known as a colour circle first recognised by Munsell (1960) which is also relevant to analysis of offending behaviour (Canter, 2000). To effectively describe an individual’s actions, the narratives of criminality identify the dominant themes in a circular order. The circle represents the actions thought to be typical actions of an offender. This leads onto the criminal hierarchy to identify the different types of offending which displays differentiation between offenders. Therefore suggesting there are two facets. The two facets consist of shared offences which move away from the centre and specific which radiate around the centre. This is known as the Radex model developed by Guttman