way to test causation in criminology is with the use of longitudinal data. Longitudinal data has the goals of quantifying trends in behavior, describe progression of life events, examine patterns of behavioral change, and begin to apply theories to such data. This type of data allows for the examination of causal research. It helps to evaluate programs such as intervention or rehab and also in regards to methods in reducing crime. Longitudinal research designs are ones that involve repeated measurement over time of one or more groups of subjects. This helps because it is research over time and is useful in determining causal relationships between variables. There are four specific types of designs that can be used, which include trend studies, cohort studies, panel designs, and time-series designs. A theory that is used to explain disorganization in the neighborhoods is the social disorganization theory which was developed based on the works of Henry McKay and Clifford R. Shaw. This theory states that neighborhoods affected with high poverty rates and economic depression are often victim to high rates of population turnover. They are also commonly very diverse in their population. Social disorganization theory says that a high turnover rate in population lead to a failure in the development of an informal social structure, which results in difficulty in maintaining social order in a community. This in turn leads to high rates of violence and crime in that specific neighborhood. Criminology as well as all social science often relies on sampling as a research method, for a variety of reasons. First is that if a sample is truly non-biased then it can be viewed as reliable data. Some issues that often come up with this are obtaining a biased sample, and not obtaining enough responses to get a truly representative sample of the population who are studying or trying to make generalizations about. Sampling is much more cost effective than observing, or trying to survey an entire population. Overall sampling can be a very reliable data source if conducted correctly. New Directions Neighborhoods have been a target of criminologists for current and recent research topics, and a great way of obtaining data from them has been hierarchical linear modeling: the key being spatial dependency. Spatial dependency deals with the association independently measured values have with each other. Another area of advancement in the field of criminology is developmental/life course theories. This entails