ABSTRACT
One of the central ideas of this book has been the importance of ‘real life’ research in crime and justice, the focus being on the various methods that others have used, with their advantages and pitfalls. To this end a number of established researchers were interviewed to elicit their views on their own practice, and to allow them to reflect and hopefully suggest some ways around some of the common things that go wrong when ‘real life’ intervenes. The interviews have illustrated various methods that are commonly used in criminology, without suggesting, of course, that the full range of possibilities has been explored. They give explanations of the studies the interviewees have undertaken, with excerpts and references to the work they have done. In addition, in Chapter 6 I tried to bring in the interviewees’ experiences,
and also to use some relating to my own research, to illustrate the difficulties of conducting research in a political and ethical quagmire. These include some of the field notes from the ethnographies I have conducted, in order to reflect on the potential difficulties researchers in crime and justice might encounter. Again, these are not comprehensive, or even particularly representative of the files of criminology. For that chapter I drew largely on a special issue of the British Journal of Criminology from 2001, which contained a number of broad-based subject areas – from nightclub bouncers to historical studies of prostitution – yet pertinent papers discussing the issues of ethics and violence in the research process. The following section summarises the methods discussed by the inter-
viewees in the book.
