NCJ Number
232631
Date Published
2010
Length
22 pages
Annotation
Drawing on examples from the author's own research with murderers and street robbers, as well as the experiences of other researchers, this chapter appraises the process of planning, conducting, and interpreting qualitative interviews with violent offenders in a prison context.
Abstract
The first of two sections of the chapter explores some of the challenges of interview-based research with violent offenders and how these challenges might be overcome. Topics addressed are access, selection techniques, the need to be flexible in research scheduling, the interview process, facilitating free expression, the status of the researcher and researched, capturing the conversation, the nature and ordering of questions, techniques of neutralization, and discourse and linguistic analysis. The second part of the chapter considers the extent to which a broader research strategy that incorporates additional forms of data and methodological approaches can be useful. This section is acknowledged by the author to be somewhat more speculative than the first section in providing a number of possible examples of useful data combinations while acknowledging the problems that triangulation can generate. Topics addressed are official documents; other documents; other "key" individuals; victim, witness, and co-offender accounts; relatives and friends; group interviews and focus groups; multiple and follow-up interviews; collaborative interpretations; and visual data. The chapter concludes that although much is to be gained by supplementing offender accounts with other forms of data, offenders' views and experiences of their offending and their social world should still be central for researchers interested in offender motives for offending. There is no one in a better position to explain his/her thoughts, emotions, decisions, objectives, goals, hopes, and fears than the offender himself/herself. 70 references