ABSTRACT
Drug robbery is situated squarely within the drugs-crime nexus, one of the most powerful and exhaustively studied relationships in all of criminology. Drug sellers are scapegoats and held responsible, both rightly and wrongly, for the wholesale destruction of individuals and communities alike, which legitimizes them as victims. In the area of motivation, the interview schedule contained questions about the situational and interactional factors that lay behind the decision to commit drug robbery. Perhaps the greatest difficulty encountered by the field recruiters was verifying that potential interviewees met the eligibility requirements for project participation. The validity and reliability of offender self-report data have been carefully assessed by a number of researchers, all of whom conclude that semistructured interviews represent one of the best ways to obtain information about crime. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
