Offender profiling: top-down approach (A03)

Only applies to particular crimes- best suited to crimes which reveal important details about the suspect, such as murder. Whereas more common offences such as burglary reveals very little about the offender. Therefore, this is a very limited approach to identifying a criminal.

Based on outdated models of personality- the typology classification system is based on the assumption that offenders have patterns of behaviour that is consistent across all situations and contexts. Alison et al argues that is approach is naïve and is based on outdated models that do not take into consideration external factors which are constantly changing. Therefore, this approach may have very low validity as it is based on 'static' models of personality.

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