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Qualitative data: process, life history and context
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Qualitative data: process, life history and context
Qualitative studies of criminal careers have always been important: consider, for example, Meisenhelder’s interview study (1977), which, based on interviews with
a small number of property offenders, outlined the process of exiting a criminal career using social control theory. Still, it took until Sampson and Laub’s (1993) first book on the Glueck data until qualitative analyses of criminal careers really took off. In life-course criminology, the life history interview has become a particu- larly important method. Among other things, this interview form reveals ‘in the offenders’ own words the personal-situational context of their behaviour and their views of the larger social and historical circumstances in which their behavior is embedded’ (Laub and Sampson, 2003: 58). This is something quantitative data can never achieve.
Consider the benefits Laub and Sampson (2003: 58f. ) see in life history inter- views (we believe several of these benefits are valid for qualitative data in general):
· Life-history method uniquely captures the process of both becoming involved in and disengaging from crime and other antisocial behaviour.
· They can uncover complex patters of continuity and change in individual behav- iour over time.
· Life histories reveal the complexity of criminal behaviour.
· They are grounded in social and historical context.
· Life-history method shows us the human side of offenders.
Consider the example of desistance. We know that a person ceasing their criminal career in the vast majority takes the form of a process, in which the individual gradually leaves crime behind (Carlsson, 2014). It can also be a very dramatic, static event occurring at a single point in time (e. g. Cusson and Pinsonneault, 1986), but that seems to only rarely be the case. So, when studying desistance, it is a challenge for the researcher who uses quantitative data to conceptualize it as a process. It is not impossible (e. g. Bushway et al., 2001), but very often quantita- tive studies end up with a static view of desistance, because it must be understood as the absence of an observation – when the individual’s criminal offending (often measured by official records) is no longer present. There might, of course, be some indications of a desistance process at work in quantitative data: maybe the time between recorded offences becomes longer? Still, the meaning of that obser- vation is usually unclear.
Here is where qualitative data, particularly life history interviews, are at their best. By interviewing (ex-) offenders in depth about their lives in and out of crime, going beyond the structured survey-like interview form, something like a story or narrative emerges. The idea underlying this perspective on the social world is the notion that we ‘understand the occurrence of events by learning the steps in the process by which they came to happen’ (Becker, 1998: 61). So, in understanding the meaning of something – such as the processes of cumulative continuity, cumulative disadvantage, or the turning points of employment, military service, marriage and residential change – we use qualitative life-history interviews to study and understand them in the
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context of the surrounding processes of which they are a part. That is, we see how they are contingent on social context, how the turning point emerges and how change is made possible. When we do these interpretations, we must however be aware that it concerns individuals’ subjective experiences that are interpreted by this individual with the aim, consciously or unconsciously, to give the interviewer a cer- tain image of herself.
MIXING METHODS
The reader may have asked him/herself a question: there are obvious strengths and weaknesses to both quantitative and qualitative methods – so why not use both? That is a good question (further explored in Chapters 1 and 3 of this volume). Mixing methods – i. e. using both quantitative and qualitative data to arrive at a deeper, fuller understanding of a given research problem – is becoming more and more common within life-course criminology, and some of the most prominent and well-known studies in the field (e. g. Giordano et al., 2002; Laub and Sampson, 2003; Maruna, 2001) have done so. The strategy of mixing methods goes back to the Chicago School of Sociology, where very quantitatively driven studies (e. g. Shaw and McKay, 1942) were complemented by life histories such as the one by Shaw (1930) about ‘Stanley’, the famous jack-roller. It has, however, been a con- troversial area:
Because of the methodological paradigm struggles that arose in the last three decades and the lingering prejudices that resulted, the idea of combining qualitative and quan- titative work has an aura of the exotic or even forbidden among criminologists today. (Maruna, 2010: 124)
The underlying issue here is one concerning the philosophical assumptions that dif- ferent methods are supposedly attached to. To repeat: quantitative analysis, it is said, assumes an objective reality that it is possible to measure in numbers; qualitative analysis is said to assume a subjective reality that is constructed and made ‘real’ through people’s perceptions and interpretations, a reality thus only possible to access by analysing those interpretations. However, this harsh division between the methods is becoming more and more loose, being replaced by a form of methodo- logical pragmatism where the researcher – as we mentioned above – chooses a method that (1) can provide data that answers the research question, and (2) is pos- sible given the practical circumstances of the research project.
Several research projects adopt a mixed method strategy, and here we only illus- trate the strategy with one famous example: Laub and Sampson’s (2003) study, where they conduct a follow-up of the Gluecks’ (1950) Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency study, tracing the men up to age 70 (see Box 13. 4).
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