The Top Down and Bottom Up Approaches

Forensic Psychology – Offender Profiling

In this course, Professor Ciarán O’Keeffe (Buckinghamshire New University) explores offender profiling. In the first lecture, we think about the top down and bottom up approaches to profiling, and review a range of definitions of offender profiling. In the second lecture, we think about the FBI’s organised and disorganised crime scene and criminal typologies. Next, we think about the investigative psychology approach as an alternative to the ‘FBI approach’. In the fourth and final lecture, we think about geographic profiling and its origins in John Snow’s ‘cholera map’ of London.

The Top Down and Bottom Up Approaches

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.