Qualitative Research in Criminology

Advances in Criminological Theory

Wilson R. Palacios, Jody Miller, Wilson R. Palacios

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367598259
• eBook ISBN: 9781351495240
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

"This volume investigates the significant role qualitative research plays in expanding and refining our understandings of crime and justice. It features seventeen original essays that discuss the relationship between methodology and theory. The result is a theoretically engaged volume that explores the approaches of qualitative scholars in the collection and treatment of data in criminological scholarship.Among the key issues addressed in the volume are methodological rigor in qualitative research; movement between method, theory building, theoretical refinement and expansion; diversity of qualitative methodologies, from classic field research to contemporary innovations; and considerations of the future of qualitative criminological research.Qualitative research use has expanded rapidly in the last twenty years. This latest volume of Advances in Criminological Theory presents a cogent appraisal of qualitative criminology and the ways in which rigorous qualitative research contributes to theorizing about crime and justice."

Part I

Qualitative Criminology: History and Epistemology

1

Criminal Practice: Fieldwork and Improvisation in Difficult Circumstances

Dick Hobbs

It has been the dream of philosophers that theoreti-

cal and abstract science could and someday perhaps

would succeed in putting into formulae and into

general terms all that was significant in the concrete

facts of life. It has been the tragic mistake of the

so-called intellectuals, who have gained their knowledge

from textbooks rather than from observation

and research, to assume that science had already

realized its dream. But there is no indication that

science has begun to exhaust the sources or significance

of concrete experience. The infinite variety

of external nature and the inexhaustible wealth of

personal experience have thus far defied, and no

doubt will continue to defy, the industry of scientific

classification, while, on the other hand, the discoveries

of science are constantly making accessible to us

new and larger areas of experience

(Park and Burgess 1921: 15).

“Quant rules” in criminology, as Richard Wright and his colleagues explain in Chapter 17, especially amongst policy makers and their academic apparatchiks. However, fieldwork-based studies of drug users, gang members, thieves, robbers, and other deviants are among some of the most lauded within the criminological canon, imbuing to some of their authors an almost mythical veneer of authenticity that is derived from close proximity to “the street,” or what Shover shrewdly calls our “bread and butter” (Shover 1996: xiii). While it is often presented, particularly to students, in terms of a sequence of interdependent and linked procedures, in practice fieldwork is like life itself—an improvised gig (Becker 1964: 602–603; Denzin 1989: 245). This chapter will stress the contribution that field-based studies have made to our understandings of crime and control, while locating some of the theoretical boundaries of field-based contributions in criminology.

Fieldwork

Fieldwork refers to the research practice of engaging with the worlds of others in order to gain an understanding of the operations and mechanisms of a particular way of life and the meanings that members of that culture attribute to these everyday occurrences. This can only be achieved by making close observations from within an environment that is natural to those being observed, for to varying extents, the fieldworker is a stranger in the field. The extent of the strangeness experienced by the fieldworker will vary according to the specific culture under study and the background of the fieldworker. The shapes, patterns, and trajectories of action observed and experienced in the field are recorded as field notes, which are usually written up as soon as possible after the action (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011) and consist of observations and reflections that are representative of time spent in the field. As selective narratives, which when accumulated over a period of time will form the core of an academically framed account of a culture, field notes enable the construction of “thick description” (Geertz 1973), offering a window on disparate social worlds that would otherwise remain hidden or obscured.

Strangeness and distance were distinct features of nineteenth-century anthropological fieldwork, where the colonial context assured that a distance between researchers and subjects was maintained, and any sharing of perspective with the studied population was at best extremely unlikely. Fieldworkers remained remote from the realities of the everyday lives of the natives and were preoccupied with the collection of artifacts and description, rather than with the generation of theory (Wax 1972). However, the evolution of fieldwork from an archaeological enterprise linked closely to the rigors of colonial rule into an interpretive device where the fieldworker is an essential interactive component has been a richly productive development for the social sciences. Yet it was a journalist, Henry Mayhew, who, via the establishment of more intimate relationships with his subjects, marked an early attempt to document transgressive social phenomena via observation and interviews.¹

Mayhew located everyday deviance in the material conditions and lived experiences of working-class Londoners. Although vivid description remains an enduring characteristic of his work, theoretically Mayhew situated deviance within the local political economy as an inevitable response to irregular work (Mayhew 1980: Vol. 1). Mayhew wrote about costermongers (street traders of fruit and vegetables) who were distinguished by their language, their attitude to employment, their disruptive pastimes such as dog fighting and gambling, their dismissal of religion and formal marriage, and their violence and physical opposition to authority. The unearthing of the costermongers should be seen as a forerunner of the appreciative work on deviant subcultural life that emerged a century later (Mayhew 1980).

Chicago

Inspiring some of the most influential fieldwork-based studies of deviant behavior, the University of Chicago’s Department of Sociology combined ecology, formalism, and journalism. Soaked in the dangerous mystique of the city as a social laboratory, the aura that surrounds the Chicago School is urban and gritty, engaging via fieldwork with the social problems of a rapidly evolving urban setting. While this imagery often ignores other, more mundane, complimentary methodologies and concerns of Chicago’s sociologists (Abbott 1999; Platt 1995, 1996), it cannot be denied that their fieldwork-based studies have enduring qualities that have inspired generations of researchers (see Deegan 2001).

The sociological identity of the Chicago researchers and their work is important as a foundation for fieldwork-based studies of crime and control. They were not criminologists, nor was fieldwork regarded as a process separate from theory construction. Consequently, and against a backdrop of rising influence of statistical analysis within American sociology, the Chicagoans emphasized the importance of “the inquiring attitude” that refused to separate theoretical and empirical concerns, while promoting eclectic methods and methodological innovation (Fielding 2005). Yet for the most part, fieldwork was taught as part of an academic apprenticeship, rather than as a means of imparting technical knowledge. “Nobody taught any of us; I think you’d say we were self-taught, we proceeded from inspiration from people we liked, like … Everett Hughes” (E. Gross, interview, quoted in Platt 1995).²

Prompted by Robert Park’s exhortations to his students to “go get the seat of your pants dirty in real research” (Becker, cited in McKinney 1966: 71), the Chicago School’s early studies located deviance as an essential part of immigrant-based communal identities in the process of assimilation. Consequently, “the life of the slum is lived almost entirely without the conventional world” (Zorbaugh 1929: 152), and the sense of difference, separateness, and normality within a milieu of rapid change set the scene for the classic studies that were to follow.

For many Chicagoan studies, theoretically informed description of the sense of order that emerges from apparently fragmented communities, rather than the construction of theory, is the principle product of their fieldwork. For instance, with no methodological instruction other than Robert Park’s suggestion to “(w)rite down only what you see, hear and know, like a newspaper reporter” (Anderson, 1961: xii), Anderson depicted the social world of the hobo as a complex cultural universe integral to both the reality and myth of the United States. In a similar but less personal vein, Cressey (1932), who was also concerned with a social world, that of a commercial dance hall where women were employed as dance partners, concentrated upon the meaning of the hall for the working women and the patrons, teasing out “the distinct vocabulary and ways of acting, the interpretations of activities, the code, the organization and structure, and the dominant schemes of life” (Cressey 1932: 53).

One of the most influential theoretical products of the Chicago School is social disorganization, which is largely associated with Shaw and McKay (1942), who utilized spatial maps to locate delinquency. Although social disorganization theories are essentially about place, rather than people, fieldwork-based studies also featured in this highly influential and contested theory. Thrasher’s study of Chicago youth gangs (1963) employed a mixture of “census and court records, personal observation, and personal documents collected from gang boys and from persons who had observed gangs in many contexts” (Short 1963: xviii). Virtually every possible working-class street group is featured in the study, and while the interview segments and life histories are strangely dry and formal, the notion of deviant groups being interstitial, filling the voids left by various forms of urban disorganization, has been enormously influential on subsequent theory (Thrasher 1963: 46).

Disorganization as a prime factor in producing deviance was refuted by Whyte’s fieldwork-based Streetcorner Society. As Whyte explains, “Cornerville’s problem is not lack of organization but failure of its own social organization to mesh with the structure of the society around it” (Whyte 1955: 273). Whyte highlighted “a documented hierarchy of personal relations based on a system of reciprocal obligations” (1955: 272), where much deviant activity was regarded as normal. He provides a rich description of everyday deviance, and the highly personal methodological appendix that first appeared in the 1955 edition is a fine introduction to fieldwork that stands as a rejection of the kind of methods course that attempts to mimic “quants” and convert fieldwork into a sequential, overly prescriptive, technical exercise.

In a similar vein, Suttles wrote about informal organizations whose primary function was to protect the “defended neighborhood” from intruders. His time in the field discovered youths who are “hardly the unruly and unreachable youths that we are led to expect … The street corner groups not only make their members known to the remainder of the neighborhood, but create a network of personal acquaintances that augment those already in existence” (1968: 172–173). The perception of deviance being crucial to the local social order is pivotal to the fieldwork-based ethnographic work of both Whyte and Suttles, emphasizing a local order where youth thrive more in harmony than in conflict with their locale.

Although the Chicagoans tended to shy away from theoretical generalizations, when viewed as a collective enterprise, their emergent theoretical outputs clearly constitute a framework that addresses the timeless sociological conundrum regarding the link between structure and action. Further, by eschewing formal theory, the Chicagoans focused upon the empirical realities of social interaction and, in so doing, emphasized the meaningful worlds of social actors. Formalism had a particular influence upon Chicagoan theory and highlighted social patterns that are brought to life through social interaction. Coherence and continuity were made possible by the reproduction of social worlds that cannot be abstracted from the empirical conditions in which they were observed and from the point of view of fieldwork-defined theory. These worlds do not exist independently of the actions that created them. Thus Byzantine, complex social worlds can never be reduced to narratives of grand theory featuring monolithic social systems. The fluidity of social life that emerges from Chicago has been the most enduring feature of subsequent fieldwork-based studies, proffering an invitation to explore and, most importantly, to appreciate the imaginative worlds of deviants. Consequently, our understanding of deviance and control is defined by the actions of participants and the meanings that they attribute to action, rather than by empirical validation imposed by social facts or law-based edicts.

As Blumer explained, “The road to … empirical validation does not lie in the manipulation of the method of inquiry; it lies in the examination of the empirical social world” (Blumer 1969: 34). Symbolic interactionism [SI] was key to retaining and developing this emphasis on social meaning. After World War II, ethnographies of deviance featured prominently among the work of scholars of the “second Chicago School” (Fine 1995), who, like their predecessors, aligned themselves with sociology rather than the clearly defined administrative strictures of criminology. In these studies, interaction in complex and overlapping social worlds is described at a micro level. For instance, in Becker’s covert study of dance musicians (1951), the author worked as a musician and uncovered a partially deviant learned environment, while in his study of marijuana use (1953), deviance is presented in terms of a three-stage learning process. Becker’s collection (1963) became a flagship for an interactionist-based sociology of deviance that stood in stark contrast to conventional criminology.

Goffman’s fieldwork in a large federal mental hospital in Washington (1968) focused upon the means by which the treatment of deviant behavior instills conformity among individuals via the professionalization of informal control mechanisms and the requirement for inmates to adjust to a new stage in their moral career. Goffman’s study has been hugely influential on ethnographic studies of institutions—for instance, Carlen’s finely grained study of everyday interactions in criminal courts (Carlen 1976)—and the fieldwork-based studies of both Becker and Goffman have acquired iconic status among successive generations of scholars. The interactionist/labeling school marked a total break from legalism and focused instead upon deviance not as a quality of a specific act, but rather as a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an “offender” (Becker 1963: 9).

The Chicago School laid the foundation for “a vibrant and increasingly methodologically sophisticated program of interpretive ethnography” (Thomas 1993: 11), and despite the dominance of positivism over much empirical territory and attempts to convert fieldwork into a technical exercise, the Chicagoans set a benchmark for the establishment of imaginative and sociologically rich fieldwork-based studies of urban crime, deviance, and control.

The Radical Field

The sociology of “nuts, sluts and perverts” (Liazos 1972) peaked in Polsky’s celebration of lowlife (1971), which, despite its limited fieldwork (only one chapter is based upon fieldwork), focuses on poolroom hustling, a profession rooted in the subcultural world of urban deviance. However, Polsky is best known for a coruscating chapter (115–147) on the morality and pragmatics of fieldwork—a chapter that has been used as a rough guide by a great number of ethnographers (for instance, Adler 1985; Hobbs 1988)—where he claims that the fieldworker should learn “to suspend his personal distaste for the values and lifestyles of the untamed savages, until he goes out into the field to the cannibals and head-hunters and observes them without trying to civilize them or turn them over to colonial officials … he will only be a jail house or court house sociologist” (Polsky 1971: 145).

Indeed, during the 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Value of Qualitative Research for Advancing Criminological Theory
• Part I. Qualitative Criminology: History and Epistemology
• Part II. Narratives, Biography, and Cultural Meanings of Crime
• Part III. Positionality and the Study of Criminalized Social Worlds
• Part IV. Comparative Social Organization of Place and Crime
• Part V. Understanding Punishment and Society
• Part VI. Long Views on Qualitative Criminology
• Contributors
• Index