The Top Down and Bottom Up Approaches

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about the top down and bottom up approaches to offender profiling, focusing in particular on: (i) understanding offender profiling as lending psychological assistance to criminal investigations by being able to understand the characteristics of a criminal through information gathered at the crime scene; (ii) reviewing a range of definitions of offender profiling within psychology; (iii) understanding the top down approach as using crime information to establish offender characteristics; (iv) working through the stages of David Canter’s bottom up approach to offender profiling.

About the lecturer

Professor Ciarán O’Keeffe is associate professor of education and research and head of the School of Human and Social Sciences at Buckinghamshire New University. Professor O’Keeffe’s research interests include investigative psychology and parapsychology, and has made numerous television and radio appearances alongside an array of celebrities. Some of Professor O’Keeffe’s recent publications include 'Things That Go Bump In The Literature: An Environmental Appraisal of 'Haunted Houses'' (2020) and 'Restorative Justice and Recidivism: Investigating the impact of victim-preference for level of engagement' (2014).