While the emphasis in this article is on physical force by police officers, the perspective adopted is one of a transaction affected by police characteristics, citizen characteristics, and their interactions in a given setting. The violent police-citizen encounter, moreover, is considered a developmental process in which successive decisions and behaviors by either police officer or citizen, or both, make the violent outcome more or less likely. The emphasis upon mutual contributions in the encounter carries policy implications that have not always been carefully considered in the past.
David A. Grant has argued that it is inappropriate to design experiments such that support for a theory conies from acceptance of the null hypothesis. The present article points out that while this position could be defended in Fisher's approach to testing statistical hypotheses, it could not in the Neyman-Pearson approach or on more general scientific grounds. It is emphasized that one optimally designs experiments with enough sensitivity for rejecting poor theories and accepting useful theories, whether acceptance or rejection of the null hypothesis leads to empirical support. The argument that, in the procedure to which Grant objects, an insensitive experiment is more likely to lead to support for a theory is shown to be only a special case of the argument against bad experimentation.
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