ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 we talked about the role of politics and values in research without mention of the different ways in which philosophical debates within social science in general have been divided on the issue of researcher neutrality. Many of you may well have thought that ‘good’ researchers must be neutral but you may not have thought about where that
idea has come from or why you hold that view. This chapter seeks to ground our advice about how to do good quality criminological research in a discussion of theories of knowledge (epistemology). Theories about the nature of the world in which crimes take place (ontology) are also very important to the task of carrying out research, and as you will see as you progress through the book as a whole these two concepts are inter-related. We will talk about three basic theories of knowledge within which crim - inologists carry out their work: positivism, interpretivism and critical criminological research. We would include feminist criminological research under the heading of critical criminological research, with the exception of any approach that explains violence in terms of inherent biological differences, because these approaches seek to change the way we think about women’s place in society and hence about the ways we come to understand crime.
