Westmarland, 2017)

Part of my PhD research involved using Freedom of Information legislation to make requests to all of the police forces in the UK to gather information and data on recorded sexual offences involving a victim aged 60 or over at the time of the offence. This involved designing two questionnaires which were used to collect the data held by the police forces:

1. The first questionnaire asked for: (a) the number of recorded sexual offences involving all victims recorded between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2013;

(b) the proportion of those cases involving a victim aged 60 or over.

2. The second questionnaire asked for demographic information (variables) on each individual case involving an older victim. This included the gender of the victim and perpetrator, the ethnicity of the victim and perpetrator, the age of the victim and perpetrator, the location of the sexual offence and the relationship between the victim and perpetrator.

In the study, using this questionnaire allowed for consistency across the forces and provided clear questions for the police force to address when collecting the data. The questionnaires were sent via email. Thus this method allowed for quick, easy and cheap access to the relevant data. This data was then inputted into SPSS and the variables were analysed.

The survey method has been criticized by a number of academics. Bryman notes that surveys have been criticized for their tendency to ‘view events from the outside’, and for imposing empirical concerns ‘upon social reality with little reference to the meaning of the observations to the subject of investigation’ (1984: 78). Bowling accuses crime survey methodology of ‘attempting to convert a social process into a series of quantifiable moments which do not adequately reflect the experiences or feelings of those interviewed’ (1993: 241). Furthermore, Farrall et al. (1997) argue that respondents may simply report generalized responses, which may not adequately represent their actual emotions on any one occasion. Surveys rely on the researcher knowing a significant amount about the social phenomenon he/she will be research- ing, in order to provide questions and responses that accurately measure the respondents’ range of answers (Greener, 2011). As Mishler (1986) argues, ‘the stand- ard approach to interviewing [the survey interview] is demonstrably inappropriate for and inadequate to the study of the central questions in the social and behavioural sciences’ (cited in Hollway and Jefferson, 2008: 297). The main reason for this is because the approach fails to address how respondents’ meanings are related to cir- cumstances. Reliance on coding-isolated responses strips them of any remaining context (Hollway and Jefferson, 2008).

Interviews

Usually associated with qualitative methodology, semi-structured or unstructured interviews are used to gain in-depth, ‘rich’ data about a particular social phenome- non (Pierre and Roulston, 2006). Pierre and Roulston note that qualitative research methods ‘encourage richer, thicker description that might yield a true representation of authentic, real, lived experience’ (2006: 677). Face-to-face semi-structured inter- viewing is commonly used in social research, particularly feminist research, in order to find out about people’s experiences in context and the meanings these hold. Such interviews are usually conducted using a number of open-ended questions that allow interviewees to dictate how the interview progresses. Often, the interviewer will use probes to encourage further information from the interviewee (see Box 4. 3). The purpose of the interview is to gain in-depth data, placing the interviewee at the heart of the research and inductively gleaning information in a natural setting. As Bryman (1984) notes, this type of methodology is committed to ‘seeing the social world from the point of view of the actor, expressing preference for a contextual understanding so that behaviour is to be understood in the context of meaning systems employed by a particular group or society’ (p. 77). This epistemology therefore lends itself to methods which facilitate an ‘inside view’ (p. 78). The purpose of interviews is to provide descriptions which can inform theory, based on the data collected, rather than testing predetermined hypotheses or theories. Rather than seeking to gain ‘truth’ about a reality that exists outside of human perception, this qualitative method seeks to investigate the participants’ own reality. These concepts reflect an idealist, social constructionist ontological and epistemological position.

However, this does not mean that the interview method is without its limitations. One of the main problems is the difficulty in generalizing (Greener, 2011; Hammersley, 1991). Indeed, many researchers would agree with this view, particularly positivists who favour empirical quantitative data and analysis (Greener, 2011). However, it is arguable whether research of this nature necessarily needs to be generalizable. Taking the August riots in 2011 which began in Tottenham, London following the police killing of Mark Duggan and which spread across other parts of England as an exam- ple, the research suggests that the reasons why people participated in the riots were complex and multi-faceted, based on a number of political, economic and social con- ditions (Lewis, 2011). These specific conditions are arguably unlikely to present themselves in the same exact ways again, and, therefore, it is argued that what is important from a research perspective is to gain understanding of why people par- ticipated in these particular riots. Whilst themes and theories may be developed from interview-based research, it is not necessarily the priority of the research to do this. Its purpose is simply to develop understanding.