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Campus chronicle.durhamcollege.ca November 8 - 14, 20<strong>16</strong> The Chronicle 7<br />
Photograph provided by Dr. Christopher O’Connor<br />
Dr. Christopher O’Connor is an assistant professor at UOIT.<br />
Young people and crime<br />
This is one in a series of conversations with faculty experts at UOIT and Durham College<br />
Sharena Clendening<br />
The Chronicle<br />
Dr. Christopher O’Connor is no<br />
stranger to the crime and the justice<br />
system. The University of Ontario<br />
Institute of Technology (UOIT)<br />
assistant professor in the Faculty<br />
of Social Science and Humanities,<br />
has worked out west, worked at the<br />
University of Wisconsin and now<br />
he’s here in Oshawa.<br />
What does an assistant professor<br />
do?<br />
I do a lot of the method classes, as<br />
well as, a sort of data analysis, these<br />
sorts of things. So that tends to be<br />
where my teaching area is focused<br />
here. I also teach a class on risk in<br />
crime, which is an advance justice<br />
study one.<br />
What type of research do<br />
you do?<br />
I focus in a few areas; mostly<br />
I have done research on young<br />
people. I have done research on<br />
how young people steal cars, a bit<br />
on school towards transitions and<br />
how young people perceive deviance,<br />
in particular, in a boomtown<br />
setting.<br />
I have done some work in Fort<br />
McMurray. I did a research project<br />
on how young people transition<br />
from school to work in that<br />
boomtown context, where you can<br />
easily get a job driving a truck for<br />
example and make $100,000 rather<br />
than go on to further education…<br />
Recently I am doing research on<br />
policing.<br />
So how the police use social<br />
media to talk to the public. On current<br />
stuff, I’m moving some of my<br />
oil and gas research into fracking,<br />
I’m looking forward to that project.<br />
It will also include looking at some<br />
of the social aspects that goes along<br />
with fracking.<br />
How young people are often<br />
ignored to a certain extent.<br />
What makes this research<br />
relevant?<br />
I think what I try to do is provide<br />
sort of a best practices in a lot of my<br />
research, or implications for policy.<br />
In terms of some of my more recent<br />
stuff on police and social media,<br />
I’m doing interviews with police<br />
officers across Canada and trying<br />
to gather some of the best practices<br />
for how to use it.<br />
What are some of the things that<br />
go well using social media as police<br />
agencies? What are some of the<br />
things that go bad? And what I do<br />
is turn that into recommendations<br />
with things not to do and write that<br />
up and send it.<br />
When did you get interested<br />
in this topic?<br />
I have always been interested<br />
ever since undergrad, in doing<br />
research with young people, and<br />
that’s sort of where it started my<br />
interest in research. And basically<br />
how young people are often ignored<br />
to a certain extent.<br />
We research them but we don’t<br />
actually talk to young people very<br />
often or as much as we should, I<br />
think, to get an understanding of<br />
how they understand the social<br />
world, some of the issues that they<br />
have and challenges they have.<br />
So what drew me to research is<br />
how little we knew about young<br />
people. It also goes with my interest<br />
in oil and gas.<br />
I was in Alberta doing my PhD<br />
and this opportunity developed<br />
because it was sort of the height of<br />
the boom around 20<strong>05</strong> – 2006, and<br />
no one really had done that type of<br />
research in Fort McMurray on this<br />
topic, so it was an exciting time to<br />
do that.<br />
This story has been edited for style,<br />
length and clarity.
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