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.
Introduction: The Value of Qualitative Research for Advancing Criminological Theory
Jody Miller and Wilson R. Palacios
Part I. Qualitative Criminology: History and Epistemology
1. Criminal Practice: Fieldwork and Improvisation in Difficult Circumstances
Dick Hobbs
2. Kites from Drug Research Rehab
Michael Agar
3. Qualitative Research as Theorizing
Peter K. Manning
Part II. Narratives, Biography, and Cultural Meanings of Crime
4. Psychosocial Criminology: Making Sense of Senseless Violence
David Gadd and Mary-Louise Corr
5. Research Strategies for Narrative Criminology
Lois Presser and Sveinung Sandberg
6. The Culture of Violent Behavior: Language, Culture, and Worldview of Prison Rape
Mark S. Fleisher
Part III. Positionality and the Study of Criminalized Social Worlds
7. Being Trusted with "Inside Knowledge": Ethnographic Research with Male Muslim Drug Dealers
Sandra M. Bucerius
8. Recalling to Life: Understanding Stickup Kids through Insider Qualitative Research
Randol Contreras
9. Queer Anomalies?: Overcoming Assumptions in Criminological Research with Gay Men
Vanessa R. Panfil
Part IV. Comparative Social Organization of Place and Crime
10. Qualitative Research in Comparative Context: Understanding Crime and Politics in Brazilian Shantytowns
Enrique Desmond Arias
11. Swim against the Tide: Using Qualitative Data to Build a Theory on Chinese Human Smuggling
Sheldon X. Zhang and Ko-lin Chin
Part V. Understanding Punishment and Society
12. Observing Prisons, Conceptualizing Punishment: Ethnography and the Possibility of Theory
Lynne Haney
13. Appreciative Inquiry, Generative Theory, and the "Failed State" Prison
Alison Liebling
14. Penal Artifacts: Mining Documents to Advance Punishment and Society Theory
Mona Lynch
Part VI. Long Views on Qualitative Criminology
15. Cultural Criminology as Method and Theory
Jeff Ferrell
16. Qualitative Research, Theory Development, and Evidence-Based Corrections: Can Success Stories Be "Evidence"?
Shadd Maruna
17. Where Are We? Why Are We Here? Where Are We Going? How Do We Get There? The Future of Qualitative Research in American Criminology
Richard Wright, Scott Jacques, and Michael Stein
Contributors
Index
e–Inspection Copy